User Experience Forms In The Head

The majority of people when thinking about good user experience consider basic principles of design and development, modern UI trends, special tools and software. Naturally, these points are important and helpful, however, they are just a tiny part of a whole picture. A truly profitable product is the one that delivers astonishing UX and has great financial worth for the business owner.

User experience is often associated with a product, service, software or whatever you are developing that helps the audience to achieve their goal quicker, easier and more effectively, in addition to being comfortable for the user. Nevertheless, the user experience is not mainly about a result you achieved with the tools you worked with or the product you created, it's about how you think about that stuff. Basically, it's not about your strategy and manual work, it's about how you realized that you need to choose exactly this strategy. Not your choice is important, but a really valuable thing is how you made it. In other words, not the content or controls form the user experience at the first place, but the fact whatever they truly belong there or not.

Why Even Great Design Can Fail

Actually great design (from designers and developers point of view) cannot bring you any success or profit. This is connected to the way companies start their UX measures, design and development process.

Essentially, as a starting point one can use:

• Themes

If the team starts building a website, an app or software from themes, firstly they choose the pre-built theme. This template becomes the basis for UX and UI as well as for the future project. In 90% cases, this theme remains throughout the development. Of course, it can be astonishing, beautiful, amazing, incredible, BUT it was chosen without any preliminary analyzes. The team picked it simple because of the way it looks. The theme you selected doesn't take into account needs and objectives of the project, as well as its unique challenges.

• Somebody's work

We know, it's extremely hard to start if you have nothing. So you start hitting the Internet in order to find new amazing UIs. But you are looking for an answer in a wrong place since the only thing you can achieve by copying other designers’ or developers’ work is to adjust someone's solution to the problem you may not have. Your main point is to meet your exclusive challenge and find a solution that will satisfy you, your client and users. Unfortunately, duplicating the work of others you won't reach your personal goals.

• Popular trends

Well, that's probably the most common way of creating UX. For instance, today flat design becomes extensively common among websites, software and applications. While it's good for one business, it poses a threat to another. Designers follow this trend without thinking about the effect it can bring. Will it be appropriate? Will users like it? Visitors like everything to be intuitive and interactive and if they don't understand why this button should be clickable or why they need to tap here, they won't have any business with you. You can't remove visual signals and expect users to know how to communicate with that interface.

So why won’t these approaches bring you a profit you expect?

Because people choose this way of creating UX for specific reasons, which generally have a huge impact on the software or game development services quality.

Such reasons can be brought by one of these schemes:

1. The team has limited timeframes

When developers, designers, artists, and managers work under great pressure and absurdly narrow timeframe, this destroys absolutely any creativeness and rational thoughts. They don't do any research regarding what's appropriate, necessary and comfortable for users, they just want to get the job done on time. They don't pay attention to the real objectives of a specific project.

2. Other departments decide upon UX

It can happen in enterprises as often as in small companies. Someone say "make it look like this website/tool/app/game" and show you or give you a link to the product you consider to be great in terms of UX. Or client tells you something like "we want the same design as everybody else". In that case, the team has limits in advance even before the development starts and they realize the challenges of that project without any doubt.

3. Clients (Supervisors) want the team to do things they are inexperienced with

We don't think that many comments are needed. Everyone knows that it's unfair and unprofessional to ask someone to do the job they are not responsible for, however, we can observe this universally.

But what if you discover all these approaches and reasons in your project? How can you improve the development of your UX? The answer is quite simple, as Joe Natoli (http://www.givegoodux.com/about/) once stated: "Think first. Design next."

Strategic thinking can do a great job for you since if you really think the UX over, you'll find that great UX is evident UX. If you skip that brainstorm you most likely end up designing something that will be refused by users because they don't like or just can't use.

Every member of a team can take his or her part in great user experience by changing the way of thinking and understanding of the term "UX". You'd better spend some additional time making sure everyone realize what is standing behind every feature you design and every action you allow a user to perform. Here we collected a list of questions that would be great to ask every day before performing any action:

• Will the thing I'm creating bring the reward to the clients/my company? Are the time and efforts you spend on that comparable with the potential profit?
• Is this thing no matter what it is (function, feature, button) truly important for the users? Do people consider it valuable and useful? Is its presence necessary? Will it make any difference if you just exclude this function/feature? (You know what to do if the answer to the last question is positive, don't you?)
• How do they suppose this function/feature to work? Does it behave according to their expectations?
• Does the overall image contribute with target audience beliefs about how it should look? Is the content relevant? Does it help people to understand your product and act according to your needs?

The answers to these questions form the basis of the user experience. And only then every member of the crew will perform every action or make each decision in accordance with that basis. And let us be straight, these everyday activities will be different. This way you and your team members can learn how to avoid unnecessary design and development that require additional time and money because from now on you can focus on what really matters.

Victor Terekhovskyi, Marketing Specialist at Program-Ace