BTN Article - USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN - A KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION BY SANDEEP RAUT

Digital Transformation is moving any company into the future. 

Well, this statement is true for Disney, Nestle, Apple, Amazon and other leaders as they focused mostly on the customer/user experience.

Digital Transformation is in almost every c-level magazine, blog and whitepaper, and executives do not want someone coming in and disrupting their business.

If you want to reap the rewards of the digital revolution, a smooth, easy and positive user experience is vital.

People may not be getting technically proficient, but they have become more comfortable using their smartphones to download music, find the nearest movie theatre or pay for purchases. This raises the bar for user experience.

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User Experience Design - a key to Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is moving any company into the future. Well, this statement is true for Disney, Nestle, Apple, Amazon and other leaders as they focused mostly on the customer/user experience.

Digital Transformation is in almost every c-level magazine, blog and whitepaper and executives do not want someone comes in and disrupt their business.

If you want to reap the rewards of the digital revolution, a smooth, easy and positive user experience is vital.

People may not be getting technically proficient, but they have become more comfortable using their smartphones to download music, find the nearest movie theatre or pay for purchases. This raises the bar for user experience.

Today organizations are adopting Mobility, Analytics and Internet of Things for Digital. However, solutions, which are not intuitive, responsive and social, does not have a place in customer’s list. So it becomes appropriate for companies to get into the user experience space.

A UX design can supercharge productivity, add immense value to customer interactions, and help employees love their jobs.

It is extremely important to do an accurate analysis of users, their needs by conducting surveys, workshops to design the UX.

Here are six major criteria for UX design:

• Easy to find: How easy it is to find a site or application
• Ease of use: How easy it is to use the site or application, how easy to learn
• Easy to access: How easy it is to access the site or application, easy to understand, easy to reach
• Usefulness: How useful the features and functions are and they meet my needs
• Elements of desirability: Will make users like the product’s looks and feel and visual appeal
• Credibility: How much users trust the site or application, creating the overall brand experience

Overall UX design should have short navigation steps so users require very few clicks to get the information they want. It should be based on responsive web designs so application maintain full functionality, usability and appeal on different browsers and screens from desktop to laptops to tablets to smartphones.

Once you have applied these criteria it is also important to measure the results, for future course correction. One initial KPI is user adoption rates, which should be higher than 60%.

The great user interface makes the experience better, transactions easier, decision making simple and cuts down the operational costs. 

It is the deciding factor for keeping/loosing or successfully engaging a customer.

What is the difference between UX & UI?

Remember when we were young and wanted to use ketchup and it did not fall down from the glass bottle in the dish? We had to turn the bottle upside down and smack it on the bottom to pour it. The company did not realize that making the glass bottle with attractive label looks good but actual experience of using it is very bad. 

That is the simple difference between user interface (the glass bottle) and user experience (pouring the ketchup).

A User interface is a simple, intuitive means for a user to interact with PCs, smart mobile devices, websites, communication devices, and software applications.

All our five senses Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch and Taste are user interface for us to interact with the world and what we get is user experience of the world.

Today with so much digital all around us, User interface (UI) focuses on the look and feel of screens, pages, forms, text boxes, and visual elements, like images, videos, buttons and icons that you use to interact with a device, web site or product.

User experience (UX), on the other hand, is the experience that a person has as they use, interact with products and services.

Imagine when you ask a query to Google and it took more than 1 minutes to get a result. Even if the interface stayed the same, your experience with Google would be dramatically different.

UI will more focus on look and feel, responsiveness of the product. It cares for if the function works or not. UX design not only cares for its function but the users' emotion, how the users feel about when their interaction to UI.

Positive User experience enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by improving the usability, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the customer and the product. 

UI is when you go to a five star hotel for dinner and see food arranged beautifully and UX is when you eat it to find it fantastic too.

You must have visited Disneyland with your kids….the attractive colors, and themes they use to pull the crowds of children and adults at same time is user interface while after sitting on the rides like space mountain, rock n roller coaster, free fall etc. what you get is thrilling user experience.

Your Car’s steering wheel, brakes, accelerator are all UI, while kind of experience you get driving is UX.

Your UI design can make or break the success of your website or app and it is the door to the great or worst user experience.

There are some basic principles for UI to be successful:

·       Make UI as intuitive & responsive as possible

·       Don’t overload the information

·       Keep it simple to view

·       Group things appropriately

·       Multi language support with proper tool tips

Something that looks great but difficult to use and something that looks terrible but very easy to use, both are failures in today’s digital age.

UX and UI are the two most integral concepts in the world of website development. Both need to work well in relation to each other to offer the best overall outcome.