We are driven by visual stimuli and our long term memory is populated with images, not words. Our brain has almost ninety percent of the information in visual form.
In the case of digital products, customer experience also begins with a visual impact or user experience (UX) design of a website. Research shows “intentional and strategic user experience” can boost conversions by 400%. However, businesses often don’t give due attention to their products’ UX design. Therefore they lag despite putting the best marketing efforts.
Big corporations like Amazon always prioritize customer experience strategies over advertising. But, small businesses face this tough choice between managing their marketing spending or spending over product improvement.
Small businesses can also have the power to create competitive UX design without requiring a big UX team or considerable investments.
In this blog, we will be discussing UX strategies for teams and companies of any size, especially small businesses.
UX Strategies For Small Businesses
UX design lies at the intersection of technology and marketing, and therefore, holds incredible potential for small businesses. If businesses can calibrate the following strategies, even the smallest UX team can revitalize digital products. Also, they can save spending a fortune on development, marketing, and sales.
Define Users’ Priority Tasks and Discuss Them Directly
UX UI consulting services begin with user research. That means you must ask questions to your users up front, and not second-guess about their customers’ needs.
Surveying is an important part of user research for evaluating the priority tasks. You can compile the surveys in the form of checklists to list all product features you want to develop and offer. Keep concise wording and use verb + object structure to show the action and object it affects (e.g. redial a miss call). For targeted results, limit the maximum number of choices in the survey.
When you have analyzed the survey results, the next step is to hold customer interviews via phone. While surveys define the priority tasks, customer interviews expand on that information. Base your interview questions on the specific hypotheses regarding your client needs. Involve only a handful of chosen clients from your target audience. Random people, your relatives or friends don’t share the tasks and challenges of your target audience. So their feedback will not be useful and may even be confusing.
Read more: Guidelines to improve your UI Animation
The Need For Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is a UX methodology that is used in software design. It defines the efficiency of UI (User Interface) and other elements of UX (User Experience).
Heuristic Evaluation is based on 10 classic principles known as the “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design”.
Let’s take a brief overview of those 10 principles:
- Visibility of system status
Always keep your users informed about what’s happening. Even if a page or app is loading, show it’s progress.
- Match between system and real world
Avoid using technical jargon and describe your product in simple terms.
- User control and freedom
Always provide options such as undo/redo/cancel, etc. to your users.
- Consistency and standards
Maintain consistency and standards in your wording and UI patterns to bring clarity and avoid confusion.
- Error prevention
Prevent common errors using special element conditions or confirmation messages.
- Recognition rather than recall
Don’t expect your users to remember all the details from the previous page. Show them all the essential information on the screen wherever required to take action.
- Flexibility and efficiency in usage
For advanced users, provide shortcuts or preferences for frequent actions.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
Don’t let your users invest much time in thinking and decision making. Hide all information for “on-demand” viewing.
- Enabling users to recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
You can show error messages to your users along with helpful advice on how to deal with the issue.
- Assistance and documentation
Most users don’t read the documentation but still, you must provide detailed instructions because users may need assistance at any time.
So Heuristic evaluation is extremely useful for small businesses that don’t have a team of experienced UX specialists or can’t outsource. Heuristic evaluation can assist a company at any stage of development if the business is ready to pay attention to basic rules.
Usability Testing and Its Best Practices
UX design thrives on users and their feedback. Usability testing is an effective way to get feedback from multiple users and eliminate the bugs after getting their suggestions. Research shows that eighty-five per cent of UX-related issues can be detected through usability testing on a group of five users.
Build information architecture through surveys and questionnaires. Then heuristic evaluation assists you to build user-friendly interfaces. After doing all these steps, move on to usability testing and look at how users perform specific tasks.
For best results, after performing usability testing for any functionality, you can follow these steps:
- Build your prototype based on the information you gathered from customer surveys and interviews.
- Focus on your TA (Think Aloud) during usability testing.
- Set up a concrete task and goal for each test.
- Measure the time users have taken to complete a task and any troubles they faced.
Avoid Wasting Resources On Second Tasks
In UX design or in general, you should avoid improving everything all at once. Doing so and pleasing all your clients is a sure shot way to fail at everything.
Prioritization is the UX team leads’ top success driver. But it’s not always simple to maintain as small businesses may receive conflicting feedback from clients and stakeholders. Also, some clients are very active at voicing their complaints making it seem their feedback should hold more priority over others.
You should ensure that the development and implementation of new features be based solely on the survey and customer interview results. Individual clients have the right to give feedback about the product. But if it doesn’t work for a wider audience, you don’t need it.
Focusing on important tasks can assist you to avoid wasting vital resources such as people, time, and capital. Channelizing your energy into priority tasks brings maximum ROI.
Don’t Complicate The User Experience
The “less is more” paradigm strikes nowhere closer than in UX design. The fewer the choices or elements requiring less cognitive function, the easier it is to make decisions. Fast and simple decision making leads to more user satisfaction.
User research consultants have this tendency to tweak user interfaces and other design aspects, which sometimes leads to confusion for regular users. At this time when nothing sells better than “easy” and “user-friendly” UX designers should master the art of dozed information. Whenever there’s any confusion or doubt, move towards the minimalist side. Always ensure to keep the main scenario simple, texts short and to the point, and images memorable.
Conclusion
A genuine effort of creating a great user experience relates to your audience. It also proves that growth isn’t just about huge investments, ingenious sales and marketing strategies, or multi-level UX departments. At its core, UX is all about people connecting to people.
Oodles UX research services initiate projects with evidence-based strategies and meaningful insights to achieve business goals. Their services include an in-depth analysis of the target audience and the competitive environment.
