As a user experience professional, you know that the evolving demands from consumers and employers are driving the market. User experience is something that touches on almost every single business project. However, each facet or industry has its own individual issues to deal with, as there are tried and true methods and a few that are guaranteed to flop.
An IT placement company seeking to place a UX professional is looking for individuals who can identify and optimize the strategies that have proven successful and discard those efforts that typically fall flat. A UX strategy is all about identifying the rationale of the user and determining the navigation process that is most likely to appeal to the intended audience. It’s an overall concept that has been around for years. After all, businesses have always attempted to use their resources to effectively manage customers’ experiences, regardless of whether that experience is in a brick-and-mortar location or a mobile application. With the increasing digitalization of our lives, it’s just necessary to hire UX designers who have perfected applying satisfying experience strategies to technology interfaces.
Strong UX strategies:
First impressions
When you’re meeting someone it’s no surprise that the first impression is typically the one that lasts the longest. The same goes for a user’s experience. According to DesignM.ag a user’s mind is wired to remember things in a unique way that implements correlating ideas, thoughts and impressions around landmarks. So when a user is reconstructing an experience they will remember first impressions, peak wow moments that are either positive or negative in nature and the ending. As a UX professional, you know that a bad start could color a product or service in such a poor light that the project never gets the chance to upgrade and improve, which is why it is important to work to ensure that this impression a user creates is a good one.
Competitive benchmarking
It’s a competitive marketplace in whatever industry you are currently serving. As a result, most projects require a UX professional to understand what the competition is doing so that you can deliver a service that is better. Part of measuring one user experience strategy against another is crafting a competitive benchmarking system. You may want to do this continually throughout the project’s life at frequent intervals or wait longer – some UX professionals wait to do a competitive benchmarking report on a quarterly basis. This report should probably include in-depth looks at the various features included in the user experience interface and compare and contrast these individual units to similar systems being used by competitors.
Analytics
Similarly, in competitive benchmarking, you have no idea how successful the implementation of your user experience interface or strategy is if it is not measured. Web analytics is a proven industry method of accurately measuring the effectiveness of the current strategy and identifying when, where and what particular components or features truly made an impact in customer satisfaction. Unlike competitive benchmarking, which measures your strategy against others, this strategy focuses on you competing with yourself. UX professionals need to not only use web analytic reports but also understand what is being measured in its entirety. Analytics provide a clear view of individual set numbers that can be used to interpret user behavior analysis. However, there are many facets to the interpretation of data and one UX professional could see an entirely different pattern than another.
Poor UX strategies:
Similarity to Competitors
It might be easy to consider evaluating your competition and creating a user experience that emulates other organizations. However, don’t fall for this trap. It’s neither flattering to you as a UX professional, nor will it help your organization succeed or ever lead in its industry. In addition, it’s an overly safe strategy that typically fails to capture the interest of your customers – leading it to be overall ineffective.
Poor Usability
How easy is it for users to navigate your system or the interface? If your user experience is confusing or requires a dedicated amount of attention from an individual you can almost bet that it will not last long as a product perceived positively by the public. Easy-to-navigate applications, websites and software that deliver a succinct and compact experience are what many customers are looking for. Don’t create an interface that complicates matters or you will see users hijacked by competitors in very little time.
Similarly, a website or application that has a long loading process is going to receive negative reviews and rarely be visited twice. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, almost 50 percent of all online users expect to have a site load within two seconds or less and they tend to abandon sites that don’t load within three seconds.
Use a combination of strategies to avoid some of these user experience faux pas and consider implementing the use of those that have a record of success.
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