The majority of UX professionals are fairly familiar with what makes strong UX. Follow the rules, don’t go too far from conventional patterns, and use appropriate usability paradigms.
The issue is that the majority of UX design instruction given today seems to be lacking in one, very important detail: how to bring consumers from point A to point B in a way that differentiates signal from noise.
Today, we’re discussing this, and the one crucial element that can greatly improve the experience you provide for your users.
What’s the point?
What is the purpose?
Why should the users of the service or product you’re designing utilize it?
How is it superior to all possible alternatives?
Who cares if they don’t?
But most significantly, what prompted their initial search for a solution?
You must realize that customers mostly use goods or services for two of the following two reasons:
-
To amuse themselves
-
Or, to solve a problem
Therefore, we can sum up a user’s usage at this moment in the following manner:
What pleasure are they seeking, or what misery are they attempting to lessen or avoid?
The true UX process may start once we know the answer to that query.
Getting to the Point
We need to make the form follow the function once we’ve determined the point (or points).
What features will we require to assist users in moving from point A to point B, and how can we assist them in doing so in a way that is not just productive but also profoundly satisfying?
What produces profound satisfaction?
-
Help them experience the emotions they desire to experience.
-
Utility value. Facilitate the pursuit of their goals.
-
Help them complete it in a way that saves them time, energy, or money.
Deep satisfaction is produced in this way, and profound satisfaction is the ESSENCE of deep value.
Now that we have that out of the way, how can we assist our users in moving from where they are to where they want to be? And this is the key to a great user experience:
It is a subtractive process rather than an additive one.
What prevents the point from being made?
You must realize that your users already have preconceived notions about how their experience will go and how getting to the point will appear, feel, and act to them.
This expectation needs to be massively defied by us.
One of the most effective methods to accomplish this is to identify and eliminate as many steps in the current process as possible.
This generates immediate benefit since, generally speaking, solutions that need less user involvement make users happier. The distinction between declarative and imperative operations is what this is.
Instead of being the pilot, make your users the ship’s captain.
Although your product or service is in charge of the ship, you want your users to feel like they are in charge.
Keep in mind that UX is about assisting users in moving from where they are to where they want to go. Once the path has been freed of unnecessary steps, it is much simpler to accomplish that.
Other opponents of the idea
Examine these three factors first if you noticed that your users are leaving and not using your product or service:
-
At what point are they dropping off?
-
What do they say before and after dropping off?
-
After the drop-off, where do they go?
These inquiries are crucial because they help in identifying invisible barriers in your solution as well as potential direct and indirect rivals for your goods or services.
Invisible Walls
An invisible wall is basically areas of your application that shouldn’t cause problems but do.
They’re mostly discovered by usability testing. It’s called an invisible wall because people do not know that they’re there unless you actually get into testing.
The third point to make is that usability testing is not the end-all-be-all of user experience research. Usage metrics are also something we must consider.
Usage data may reveal a different narrative
Let’s assume you conducted usability tests 5×5, which means you tested with 5 users 5 different times to obtain a complete set of usability data.
That’s unquestionably a fantastic beginning and is highly commended.
However, those 25 individuals will only show you what they themselves have captured. Again, they will have detected the majority of significant items, but the issue with invisible walls is that they frequently only manifest at scale.
Overcoming unseen walls
How then do we recognize and address unseen walls?
Anywhere there is a sudden decrease in user activity, especially following a series of transactions that require them to provide you with information, is what you want to check for in your data.
This typically won’t raise too many red lights during a usability test, but if you notice in your stats that users are reaching a particular point and then leaving for no apparent reason, you’ve discovered your invisible wall.
If you and your team are unable to identify the issue, one of the best solutions is to set up a survey widget on this page to see what users are reporting, followed by a limited usability test with the problematic page and the pages immediately before and after.
When you put all of this information together, you can nearly always identify the source of the invisible wall and remove it.
What does this mean for you, then?
UX’s main objective is to facilitate your users’ completion of tasks. To accomplish that, it is best to:
-
Find out your users’ amusement and pain points
-
Get rid of extra steps that can be removed
-
Knockdown invisible walls
