Understanding customers is vital to the success of any business. The main goal of any business should be to minimise potential client frustrations with their product or service.
Whether a physical product or a digital, the idea should be to exceed customer expectations by considering customer feedback throughout the product ideation and development. One activity product developers can employ to ensure that they’re creating solutions that match what customers are seeking is user testing.
What is user testing?
User testing is a systematic process of observing how prospective users navigate a product prototype or feature. Subsequently, this information is collected to analyse the ways in which users find the product easy or difficult for them to employ.
So, user testing activities illustrate precisely what problems users may encounter during their interaction with the functions of a website, app, product, or service— in realistic conditions (or mimicking realistic conditions).
Why is user testing important?
User testing focuses on evaluation exercises to identify various pain points and positive attributes to incrementally enhance user experience before taking a product to market.
It helps to determine product usability and to decide whether a product is ready for launch to real users. User testing achieves this by collecting qualitative data to understand the intention and motivation driving customer behaviours. This consequently helps creators to make informed design decisions to positively impact user experiences.
Generally, user testing is important to:
Uncover users’ needs and challenges through their actual use of your design.
Assess prospective users’ performance and mental state as they attempt to complete tasks, to evaluate how well a design works.
Make faster-informed decisions based on proven customer needs
Implement a customer-first approach.
How does user testing work?
Following are the key steps involved in user testing:
1. Creation of product, prototype, or feature
Before you conduct a user testing exercise, you’ll require a real product or feature to test. This could be a new product, or existing version of a product, or even a sample.
2. Choose a testing method
Once you have a product or feature to test, select a method of user testing to employ. As you do this, carefully consider a test method best suited to the type of information you’re seeking to obtain, and the depth of feedback.
3. Write a test script
Afterwards, write a test script to get the most out of your time and get comparable results. This will serve as a technical guide for the moderator as it lists the tasks to be tackled sequentially and supplemented with a hypothesis and a goal.
4. Recruit subjects for the user test
After the above steps, you’ll need to recruit test respondents for your user testing. These should be real prospective clients, ideally, actual members of your intended audience, or users who match your client personas.
Such careful selection will help you achieve the desired outcomes and data from the people who matter most.
Once you have a product, testing method, and test subjects, determine the best time and location for your test.This decision depends on the nature of your product or feature, its use case and capabilities. Furthermore, you’ll need to carefully consider the test subject’s environment, as distractions might not be ideal.
User Testing can be done in a UX research lab, where you invite participants to a central location. On the other hand, you can also be conducted remotely online as well, making it possible for your test with participants from all over the world easily.
6. Decide on the length of the test.
Test respondents are sometimes cautious about the length of a user test as they sometimes have limited time. Furthermore, disparate users take different amounts of time.
Unfortunately, longer tests typically return poor-quality responses and feedback due to fatigue, boredom, and lack of interest. For moderated user testing, it’s recommended to be around 60 minutes to avoid cognitive overload on the users. As for unmoderated user testing, the study should be completed by an average of 15-20 minutes.
7. Executing the user test
Before starting your user test, ensure that your subjects have all the instructions they need. For example, directions on how to provide their feedback and analysis.
Depending on the product, industry, and preferred test method, the directions and instructions for test subjects might differ prior to or during the test.
8. Evaluate and analyse the test results.
Analysis of data should take place soon after user testing; otherwise, there is an inherent risk that important details might be forgotten. In addition, this evaluation and analysis should consider different metrics like, completion rate, error-free rate, critical errors, non-critical errors, and error-free rate.
After the evaluation process, you can make minor or drastic iterative modifications to accordingly improve your product.
Types and methods of user testing
Usability testing
Usability testing principally focuses on determining how easy a product design is to use for a group of representative users. It typically involves carefully observing users as they complete different tasks, from early product development to release.
A/B testing is fundamentally the process by which two different variants of a product are sent to different groups of prospective users. It is imperative to remember that each user group must receive only one variant of the product, not both. Furthermore, they must be sent on the same day and time to optimally track customer reactions.
Generally, the central goal of A/B testing is to extensively gain insight into customer behaviour and preferences. This testing method is one of the most efficient and fastest ways to increase customer conversions.
Focus groups
As a qualitative research technique, focus groups principally involve organising a discussion on a given product or topic with a group of 8-10 participants. These discussions typically take 60-90 minutes and seek to obtain information on users’ motivations and behaviours in response to the product.
During focus group engagements, real users discuss various attributes of a product, or feature. One of the product designers, researchers, or other employees typically leads such discussions to ensure you’re receiving your desired type of feedback.
For the most part, a focus group discussion will typically cover the test subjects’ concerns about a specific aspect of a product that’s brought up by the focus group facilitator.
Heat map testing
A heat map is a graphical data visualisation that demonstrates how website users click, scroll, and move on a web page. Heat map testing fundamentally revolves around engaging users to analyse their mouse or eye movements when using a product or service.
Subsequently, heat map analysis is conducted to analyse the heat maps generated from the recording tool to determine what grabs a user’s attention. Or even where users spend most of their time, and how much time is spent on specific areas to determine which elements need improvement.
Card sorting
Card sorting is a user testing method that involves users organising index card (physical or digital) according to criteria that make the most sense to them. During product development, this testing technique helps guide the design of information architecture, menu structures, workflows, or website navigation paths.
Respondents are a fundamental tenet of user testing. However, finding the right respondents is no easy feat, as researchers need to carefully vet them, and then schedule a time to engage them.
Unfortunately, some respondents cannot deliver meaningful feedback or insight. In turn, suboptimal respondents negatively impact the quality of user testing.
Netizen’s respondent recruitment service can help provide a tailored solution that focuses on recruiting the right respondents for surveys, focus groups, and in-depth user interviews.
Conclusion
The core purpose of user testing is to evaluate the success of a product or feature from the standpoint of customers. This is because while designers involved in the creation of the product might find it easy to use, the target customers may not.
Fortunately, user testing provides tunnel vision into where the product falls short for the intended audience. It essentially reveals where users are typically confused or frustrated. This information can then be leveraged to iterate the product’s design.
Overall, well-planned and executed user testing uncovers actionable, qualitative data that product design teams can exploit to make faster, better decisions to improve customer satisfaction.
Reach out to us at Netizen Experience to discuss about user testing services and the requirements for your project.
Any business should aim to create products that people will love to use. To achieve this, it’s important to extensively understand customers’ problems, frustrations, and expectations.User experience has slowly transformed over the last decade from a customer-centric service in the realm of product and service design to more personalized offerings. Furthermore, the emergence of multiple digital distribution channels has made delivering optimal user experiences a necessity rather than an added value.
User experience (UX) encompasses a user’s emotions and attitudes about using a specific physical product, digital application or service. It assesses practical, affective, experiential, emotive, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership.It also considers users’ opinions on a product’s features, including utility, efficiency and simplicity of use.
Why is it important to have a consistent user experience?
As alluded to, user experience is typically subjective in nature to the degree of individual perception and thought, with respect to a product. In fact, UX has been highly dynamic and constantly modified over time because of changing usage circumstances and even iterative changes to the product. That being said, maintaining an optimal user experience via consistent design is pivotal to helping the users feel a sense of familiarity with a product. As a result, users can easily transfer their existing knowledge to new contexts and environments whenever any iterations are made to a product. They can focus on completing their tasks rather than spending extra time trying to learn how to continually use the product. Thus, it helps nurture a feeling of trust whilst eliminating any potential frustrations that might trigger them to abandon tasks.
What is considered a good user experience?
A good UX is one that places a focus on customers and their interactions with a product. Overall, a good user experience will consist of the following elements:
Usefulness: A useful product always solves user problems. That being said, design intentionality is a core part of user experience since a product that’s not ‘useful’ may not always be ‘usable’.
Enjoyable: An enjoyable product is always usable as its design delights the user. Typically, such products reflect what the user may be feeling and create a positive connection with them.
Usable: A usable product indicates that its design, structure, and purpose are simple to understand. And thus, propagates a great user experience.
Equitable: An equitable product maintains a design that’s helpful to people with diverse backgrounds and abilities. In simpler terms, its design addresses the needs of diverse audiences regardless of background, gender, race, or ability.
Desirable: A good user experience should evoke emotion and appreciation via a brand identity that makes it desirable
Accessible: A great experience constitutes content that is accessible to all types of people. For example, those with disabilities.
Credible: A good user experience is credible and inspires trust.
User experience (UX) deliverables
User experience deliverables are various outputs dictated during the UX design process— either during the project or once it’s complete. In practice, deliverables enable UX designers to communicate different design ideas and findings to stakeholders in order to iterate the product and make improvements. They also allow UX designers to get buy-in for their ideas.
Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competitors can help align one’s UX strategy. For example, creating a competitive analysis report to detail the interaction designs of competitors can help pinpoint pitfalls and missed opportunities that one can leverage.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the art of structurally organising and labelling websites in a manner that’s easy to understand for users. For large sites, this is particularly important to understand disparate content elements and how to organise them for diverse visitors. For example, setting up a content inventory and a sitemap with suggested navigation, or instituting sample user flows that reveal how visitors peruse a site.
User research
User research can help uncover user needs, tendencies, and motivations. This research exercise can either collect quantitative or qualitative data from user testing sessions to inform sign-up flow redesigns or customer onboarding processes.
Interaction Design
An interaction design focuses on providing prospective users with a prototype to review how interactions with a site might occur. It seeks to uncover how users will probably complete critical tasks, seek out information, and use a product.
User Experience Design vs User Interface
A user interface (UI) is a series of pages, screens, and visual elements. For example, switches, buttons and icons that facilitate a user when interacting with a product or service.On the other hand, user experience design focuses on designing products to ensure the most positive emotional experience possible as they interact with it. Generally, a great product that people love typically necessitates both good UI and good UX. For instance, a dating app that looks visually appealing with intuitive navigation (UI) can be slow and make users click through multiple screens to make a match.In such instances, users might not want to use the app repeatedly, no matter how aesthetically commanding it looks. However, if its content is helpful and organised in a logical and intuitive way, it will most likely sustain consumer attention.
User Experience vs Usability
User experience is a design process that combines business-hypothesis driven experimentation and validated learning during product development cycles to improve user perceptions of a product. UX activities cover a user’s entire experience with a product. For example, how they expected it to work, and how they feel about continually using it.On the other hand, usability testing focuses on determining how successfully a user can exploit a product to achieve a specific goal. These are typically five key metrics used to measure usability:
Learnability:This metric evaluates how easy it is for prospective users to complete a generic task. For instance, logging into a website for the first time
Satisfaction: It assesses how enjoyable a product is to use.
Efficiency: This metric determines how fast users can fully complete a task once they have interacted with a product design.
Memorability: This metric analyses users’ ability to reuse a site fluently after taking a significant amount of time without using it. Essentially, determining how easily users can start using it again without issues.
Errors: This assesses the number of repetitive mistakes users make when using a product or site.
How to improve the user experience of a site?
Following are some key parameters to check in order to improve the UX of a site:
Page loading time
The loading page speed can make or break a website. For example, Google statistics revela that 53% of users might leave the site is loading speed is longer than 3 seconds. Simply put, humans aren’t really patient, especially when they have many options.So, it’s imperative to ensure that site users can quickly accomplish their primary goals, without going through painstaking load times. Remember, high load times and waiting times could affect the perception of users.
Use Fitt’s Law to improve UX
Fitt’s law is a predictive model used to determine the amount of time it takes for a particular user to move their mouse/cursor to a target area on a website. Despite its multiple variations, Fitt’s law revolves around the idea that the time needed to move to a target largely depends on the distance to it. It is widely used with great success in modern UX design to improve site ergonomics, usability and user experiences.
UX design tools
It is important to use the right tools for researching, storyboarding, prototyping, and wireframing to get the best user experience outcomes during the UX design process. There are a plethora of UX tools available, some free and others that dictate a monthly subscription fee. For example, Adobe XD & Figma enables UX designers to expertly curate unique websites and mobile apps with advanced prototyping, wireframing, and vector design capabilities. However, it is a subscription-based tool.On the other hand, Storyboarder is a free storyboarding software with basic features made for UX designers of all levels to quickly create drawings and stick figures to plot ideas.
Use white space generously
One cheat code to ensure optimal user experiences is smartly using white spaces. Even subtle uses of whitespace can allow one’s design to breathe and stand out. In essence, white space always adds an aura of simplicity and elegance to web pages.
Ask for customer feedback
Collecting and reacting to customer feedback can help you significantly improve user experiences. However, if you don’t listen to your customers during the design process, you risk setting yourself up to lose opportunities to enhance your product.
Conduct a UX review/audit
As humans, we tend to focus on completing a task, with very little time set for reflection. As a result, we typically create systems fraught with weaknesses and discrepancies. A UX review can help you address any issues or avoid replicating the same problems repeatedly.
Personalization in user experience
Users’ requirements for convenience and ease of use will only grow as the world evolves into an on-demand environment. This means that users expect products to be specifically tailored to them as they are continuously bombarded by different product options.With this in mind, personalization in user experience design focuses on customising user journeys and experiences to match users’ exact choices and requirements.Fundamentally, this process seeks to exclusively meet users’ requirements and instruct them through a tailored conversion funnel.
User experience examples
Duolingo
Duolingo is an educational platform for learning different languages. The website is intuitively designed to be welcoming, with three prompt questions to help users set their learning goals. Overall, the website seeks to make it extremely frictionless to get started, which sets it apart from competitors.
Image Credit: Duolingo.com
Mailchimp
As a leading marketing automation platform, Mailchimp is well known for its humanisation of technology that adds depth to the often-boring experience of email marketing. It succeeds in delivering a unique and seamless user experience with an application that serves like a team member than a simple tool, when being used to get the job done.
Image Credit: mailchimp.com
Conclusion
As we established throughout the article, a person’s feelings, perceptions and attitudes about using a product constitute user experience. We also observed that UX comprises features of human-computer interaction that are experiential, emotive, meaningful, and useful. UX has gained momentum as a consequence of modern-day users’ dynamically changing internal mental states (predispositions, moods, expectations, needs, motivation etc.). As such, it’s more imperative than ever to strive for the best user experiences that overcome complex user requirements but fulfil usability and functionality demands— regardless of the environment. To achieve this meaningfulness of activity and voluntariness of use, remember to pay attention to the following principles of UX design:
Research is mission-critical to solving navigation challenges in the UX and product design world. In fact, user research helps UX designers to better understand the users beyond their own internal assumptions.
Therefore, enabling designers to put themselves in users’ shoes to deliver better user experiences. One such research approach that facilitates optimal product and UX design is evaluative research.
What is evaluative research?
Evaluative research also referred to as evaluation research, is a specialised methodology that UX designers employ to evaluate a product and collect data to improve it.
It attempts to assess how well something is working. Whether a concept, existing product or service, or even some enhancements one is trying out.
In practice, usability testing is a central part of evaluative research; however, it is not the only part.
Evaluative research is a core part of the product development process typically introduced in the early phases of the design process. It is used to iteratively test existing or new solutions until the product becomes ‘final’. The fundamental premise of this research vertical is ensuring value is present within a product so that effort and resources are not wasted.
However, evaluative research does not stop when a new product is fully launched. Rather, solutions need to be continually monitored after their release and enhanced based on customer feedback to ensure they continue to add value (or even exceed) and meet the changing user needs.
Why is evaluative research important?
Evaluative research enables designers to test prospective products and collect valuable feedback to refine and improve the user experience. Discoveries from evaluative research are vital to assess what works and what doesn’t, as well as identifying possible areas of improvement.
That being said, evaluative research should always be a crucial part of the product development process. And by enabling users to “evaluate” a product early and often, you can know whether you’re actually building the right solution for the audience.
Additionally, the insights garnered from it can demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of a project. This can consequently help stakeholders to get buy-in for future projects whilst accomplishing product goals efficiently.
Generally, evaluative research benefits can be summarised as:
It can help in determining if a product is appropriate to replicate in other locations with similar needs.
It can be useful when demonstrating the impact on the product funders.
It can prove helpful when suggesting improvements to an existing problem for a better product
It can support any continued product or program development efforts.
Evaluative research methods
Qualitative usability testing
Qualitative user testing is a methodology that allows product designers to intuitively understand the target audience’s pain points, mental models and opinions. This method typically uses the ‘think out loud’ technique to engage participants as they interact with a prototype or product.
Preference testing focuses on deploying subjective but useful tests to measure user opinions about designs. Also called desirability testing, this approach principally focuses on comparing the aesthetic or emotional appeal of a product or concept. This is done to better understand how people perceive and respond to its different product variants.
Surveys
Here, different sets of questions are shared with prospective users to evaluate their preferences, and attitudes towards a product. Surveys involve closed or open type questions being given to a sample audience that represents a much larger population.
First click testing
First click testing is deployed to assess the usability of a product by determining whether users are able to efficiently complete a given task. In practice, this approach principally examines what participants will click on first on an interface to complete their intended task.
This is done with the aim of verifying the most effortless path the user sees to execute a task. As a result, the method is helpful in providing information about user expectations for common interface elements like menus, buttons, and form elements.
Tree testing
The tree testing research methodology enables product designers to evaluate the hierarchy and findability of topics on a platform. Essentially, a text-only version of the website’s hierarchy is laid out in front of participants.
Consequently, the participants are asked to highlight a category within that structure where they expect to find a particular item or piece of content. Generally, this approach is helpful when structuring an information architecture as UX designers can watch users swing from branch to branch.
A/B testing
Also sometimes called split testing or bucket testing, A/B testing is used to compare two versions of a product, webpage or app against each other to determine which performs best.
Task analysis
Task analysis is an effective method for finding out what users who you hope will employ your product are trying to achieve. Also, how they go about achieving complex tasks, and how effective they are in achieving their objectives.
A relatively simple technique, card sorting provides actionable insight into how users mentally structure data. In practice, users are given randomly shuffled cards and tasked with organising(sorting) them in whatever fashion they prefer.
Once the labelled cards are sorted, the users are then asked to explain why they arranged the cards in a specific manner. The results are then documented and analysed by the researchers.
When to use evaluative research?
Evaluative research should be performed during the entire development cycle of a product. Preferably, commencing from the early concept of design until the final stages of the product design.
Evaluative research examples
Evaluative research exercises typically revolve around addressing a series of questions. For example:
What are the pain points in the design?
Where are people exactly clicking, and at what frequency? Are they getting to the right place?
What are the fastest and easiest ways to redesign an existing interface?
What ways can conversion be improved?
Which of the two designs is better at helping users achieve their goals?
On the usability end, evaluative research can pose questions to users like:
How was your experience completing the task?
How would you work around performing the task?
How did you find it navigating to the page?
Based on your previous task, how would you prefer to perform this action instead?
Additionally, if a product has already been deployed, evaluative research can pose questions like:
How satisfied are you with the existing product?
How often do you utilise the product/feature?
Does the product/ help you achieve your goals?
How easy is it to use the product/feature?
Generative vs evaluative research
Generative research methods focus on exploration, discovery, and experimentation with different ideas. Generative research methods are thus driven by open-ended questions that allow users to share their life, goals, mental models, and experiences.
Evaluative research methods fundamentally focus on evaluating how good (or bad) the generated ideas are. This approach is principally driven by closed-ended questions to allow researchers to understand precisely what did or didn’t work to refine the ideas.
Is generative or evaluative research better?
Generative and evaluative research i quite distinct in character. The objective of generative research is to define the problem one would like to create and design a solution. On the other hand, evaluative research helps to analyse and understand an existing design.
Furthermore, generative research is typically done as a one-off and is in-depth. However, evaluative research is recommended as a regular exercise throughout the design, development, and product delivery process.
How to choose the right method?
Generally speaking, there is no “best” approach as both research methods have disparate goals and should be performed at different times in the development and design cycle.
Before choosing the right evaluative research approach, it’s imperative to know your research goals and objectives. This can help you choose an approach that takes into account the current stage of your product development cycle.
Talk to our user experience consulting team on how you can explore and choose the right research method and process better.
End To End User Research Service In Asia
Key Highlights
provides user research services for businesses & organizations
offers a variety of research methords, including interviews, surveys & focus groups
conduct research to understand users’ needs, behaviours & attitudes
recruit participants who match the client’s target audience & provide incentives for their participation
provides a dedicated project manager to oversee the entire research process
project manager coordinates the recruitment of participants, the scheduling of research sessions & the delivery of results
provide detailed reports that include key findings & recommendations based on the research
Evaluative research should always be a core part of any iterative design process. It ensures that the user experience is shaped and continually refined to truly meet customer needs and expectations.
Remember that the goal of the evaluative research is to iteratively test an existing solution to an existing problem to determine if it meets users’ needs, and is easy to use and access.
As such, evaluative research should only be deployed when one understands the problems they are trying to address, when they strive to get the best implementation, or when they want to create a particular user experience.
For a comprehensive understanding of how to conduct user research effectively, explore the various User Research Services offered by Netizen eXperience’s Consulting.
A great user experience is paramount to any mobile application.
After all, nobody likes an application that is horrible to navigate, right? A deep understanding of one’s target audience is mission-critical to creating an exceptional user experience (UX).
One way to derive this desired deep understanding is by modelling user personas that help product teams understand target users’ expectations, concerns, and motivations.
This consequently helps UX designers to establish a stronger user focus and serves as a constant reminder of whom they are and are not designing for.
What is a user persona in UX?
A user persona is fundamentally a fictitious and specific representation of target users. The central goal of user persona is to help the user interface (UI) design and development teams to better understand the users and improve their products.
User personas are primarily a collection of realistic representations of different real-world user characters.
For instance, the target user of a video game could be boys aged between 10-15 years. So, the ideal persona could be designed around 11,12, 13 or 14, 15-year-old boys. In summary, a user persona should always mirror a group of real-world users.
Secondly, user personas are, for the most part, imaginary. For instance, a user persona’s name, photo and social attributes are mostly fictitious. This is because these attributes don’t have a considerable impact on the interface design process.
In a nutshell, a persona is a virtual person created by the UX researchers from refined information extracted from real life, constituting details like a job title, educational background, etc.
Types of personas
Personas are categorised into four main types:
1. Goal-directed Personas: These personas focus on examining the process and workflow that a prospective user might prefer to employ to achieve their goals when interacting with your product or service.
2. Fictional Personas: Fictional personas emerge from the past experiences of a UX team with the user base and products to deliver an informed picture of what typical users look like.
3. Role-Based Personas: Role-based personas are goal-directed and also focus on user behaviour and role in an organisation. They are massively data-driven and integrate data from qualitative and quantitative sources.
4. Engaging personas: Engaging personas integrate goal, role-directed personas, and traditional rounded personas. They are designed so that the designers who employ them become more engaged with them.
Why are user personas important?
Personas are a well-established “interaction design technique” in user experience research. They help product managers, UX designers and developers decide on product/user requirements, interaction patterns, and presentational design.
As fictional characters embodying common characteristics of the different prospective user groups, personas help explain the end users’ “attitudes towards a product” in relation to their daily lives.
For example, they help explain how users might respond to, or interact with the new system, thus eliciting key requirements for the system developers.
Overall, personas help product designers and developers to understand:
What would motivate users to employ a product/ service.
The needs of the user to employ a product/ service.
The pain points of the user while using a product/ service.
The primary goals the user wants to achieve through a product or service.
The behavioural and emotional states of the users in different situations.
User personas help UX researchers to ask the right questions and answer them while proposing possible interventions and preventing common design pitfalls like:
Self-referential design: When UX designers or UX engineers design like they’re building the product only for themselves. Yet the target audience is quite unlike them.
Design for elastic users: When product decisions are made by disparate stakeholders who define the ‘user’ according to their convenience.
Personas are fictional characters in the user-centred design process. Therefore, their creation dictates exploratory research to realistically represent the different user types that might employ a service, product, or website.
Though it’s relatively straightforward to select a set of user characteristics to form a persona, it’s challenging to create user personas that are effective design and communication tools.
An effective persona that helps product designers and developers fully understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals typically demonstrates several characteristics like:
Not being composed of fictional guesses at what a target user thinks. In actuality, every aspect of the persona’s description should be tied back to real data (observed and researched, this could be from user research such as user interview insights or survey studies data).
Reflecting real user patterns, not only different user roles.
Being context-specific, with a focus on the behaviours and goals related to the particular domain of a product.
Steps to create a user persona
The following are some basic steps required to create a user persona:
1. Collect user information (through qualitative and quantitative user research)
Effective personas are derived from a large amount of user data. Thus, before the creation of a persona, one has to extract user insights or data via observations or interviews.
Product developers can also solicit data from reliable third parties, like user research agencies, to provide user data, as gathering user data directly from target users can be time-consuming.
In this initial step, it’s imperative to avoid generating user personas of users that don’t have any relation to the actual target user’s reality.
Remember that entirely fictional/imaginary people who aren’t based on research bring no value to the design process.
In fact, they bring harm as poorly constructed personas can easily undermine the product’s usability.
2. Analyse the research findings
The fundamental premise of this step is to identify patterns in user research data in order to effectively group similar people into types of users.
To achieve this, ensure to list all the behavioural variables (ways in which users’ behaviour differs), then map each interviewee against the appropriate set of variables.
Afterwards, identify actionable trends by clustering across six or eight variables to derive group trends that will form the basis of each persona.
3. Decide on the number of personas you want to create
In the next phase, it’s important to decide on the number of personas you seek to create.
To achieve this, find out related user categories for the product, according to a set of tasks, job descriptions or other external factors related to their interactions with the product.
It is easy for product teams to create too many personas with many overlapping user needs, so it is a good idea to streamline this persona creation process a few times to ensure that the personas you are going to create are distinctive from each other. Having too many personas with overlapping needs can become confusing for the product team when designing.
4. Create persona descriptions based on behavioural patterns
During this phase, assemble a persona’s descriptions around behavioural patterns to describe each in a manner that expresses an extensive understanding and empathy towards users.
In this stage, avoid the temptation to add many personal details as personas only need to be realistic, not real, as long as they accurately characterise the user base.
5. Create scenarios to integrate the personas
User personas have no value on their own and are only valuable when tied up to a scenario.
In practice, a scenario is an imagined situation describing how a persona will interact with a product in a particular context in order to achieve its objective.
Scenarios enable UX designers to understand the main user flows to gather requirements and create design solutions. Fundamentally, scenarios should be written at a high level from the persona’s perspective and articulate use cases that will most likely happen.
Ensure to thoroughly document the persona when designing a user persona template. In fact, ensure to always include information like the persona’s name, photo, gender, age, location, marital status, goals, pain points, and behaviours.
7. Share your UX personas
Ensure to share your personas among stakeholders so that they have a positive association with personas and realise the value in them.
Remember that a well-constructed persona almost becomes another member of the design team.
User persona examples
Since personas are documents that describe the overall attributes, motivations, and frustrations of a user, you need to conduct enough user interviews to paint a clear picture of a prototypical user.
If the prospective users of a product distinctly vary, then create multiple personas. For example:
Mary: The Homemaker
Age: 38
Gender: Female
Marital status: Married
Children: Two boys, ages 5 and 9
Occupation: Stay-at-home mother
Education: Associate’s degree
Location: Joplin, Missouri
Influencers: Oprah, Church leaders
Sources of information: Blogs, YouTube, Facebook groups, T.V., radio
Goals: To stay on budget
Frustrations: Juggling many tasks
Aspirations: Desires for her family, friends, and church acquaintances to see her as a successful homemaker.
John: Business Class
Age: 40
Gender: Male
Marital status: Unmarried
Children: None
Occupation: Business Manager
Education: Executive MBA
Income: $120,000/year
Location: Los Angeles– travels all over the U.S. and South East Asia
Influencers: Elon Musk, Aaron Ross, Steve Jobs
Sources of information: The Wall Street Journal, tech blogs, sales blogs.
Goals: To earn enough money to have a comfortable retirement.
Conclusion
All things considered, critically understanding the needs of prospective users is mission-critical to developing a successful product.
Descriptive user personas enable designers to efficiently identify and communicate user needs, which is essential to the product’s overall value proposition.
Furthermore, user personas help UX designers decide which features to maintain in a prototype whilst iteratively evaluating the end product.
Additionally, user personas help stakeholders to build empathy with users and their needs, and as a result, everyone working on the product could align their design decision-making by having the same understanding of the persona. And when combined with other UX research methods, like usability testing, personas help to launch a useful and usable solution.
Most online services today have become highly interactive and are delivered via mobile devices. This means that user interface(UI) and user experience (UX) have an ever-increasing role to play in today’s technical world.
While UX traditionally focuses on the experience that users have with a product and service, UI focuses on the ease of interaction with a product’s interface.
What is UI/UX design?
UI/UX design revolves around a set of activities that seek to deliver a productive, usable, and visually satisfactory interactive tool.
These activities involve concepts and workflows that aim to produce an experience that is enjoyable and empathetic while remaining aligned with an organisation’s business goals.
UI/UX design activities typically encompass user research, product design, usability studies, information architecture, content strategy, user interface (UI) design, visual design, prototyping, and more user testing.
So, while UI designers decide how the user interface will aesthetically look, UX designers ultimately determine how the user interface will operate.
For more information, read this comprehensive guide on “User Interface.”
10 innovative user interface design examples
Drink Half Past
This innovative beverage company exploits a unique and dynamic visual colour palette on their website design to show a playful side of the brand.
Image Credit:www.drinkhalfpast.com/
It maintains a consistent colour match across every block of content for corresponding flavours.
This unique colour implementation strategy matches the flavour of each drink while reflecting the ingredients inside. In a way, this visually probes website visitors to experience the uniqueness of the product, even before making a purchase.
Pinterest
Pinterest’s icon UI delivers a waterfall effect to provide users with a seamless experience. In practice, each Pinterest card is given a subtle shade whenever it interacts with the mouse.
This can be aesthetically pleasing to users whilst giving the perception of “clickability”.
Image Credit: www.pinterest.com
Headspace
Headspace provides accessibility options that are inclusive for all users. Users can flexibly choose colours, navigation options, sizing, and even readability preferences on the platform.
Furthermore, users can also exploit capabilities like text magnifiers, voice communication, and a virtual keyboard to access medication features.
Overall, this array of amazing accessibility and usability flexibility enables users to adapt the system to their preferences so they can comfortably use it with freedom and control. It results in a very enjoyable user experience, and in turn, repeat visits.
Pitch
Pitch is a collaborative mobile and web app for building and managing professional presentations. Hence, its website UI presentation has to somehow reflect its ethos.
Its website intuitively walks users through what their journey would be like if they actually used the application. With a clean and cohesive flow that avoids clutter, it does a great job of highlighting the primary product features of its offering.
Image Credit: www.pitch.com
Squarespace
Squarespace employs card carousels to display the templates within their application. This allows users to quickly scan through several options at once. Overall, its UI deploys a clean, straightforward design with minimal copy and a centrally aligned navigation.
Image Credit: www.squarespace.com
It also keeps a consistent feel with the rest of the app, which enables users to learn it faster. For example, it provides a constant indication of the number of templates available, so users know where they are as they progress.
Dropbox
Dropbox employs responsive colours to great effect rather than employing a single symbolical colour. This colour dynamism helps keep users continually engaged as they navigate the Dropbox website.
Image Credit: www.dropbox.com
Semplice Labs
Semplice Labs offers a beautiful but functional UI that features fluid animations and smooth transitions that are desirable to users. This company boasts a reputable WordPress portfolio created by designer Tobias Van Schneider, who is known for his work with Spotify, BMW, and Google.
Image Credit: www.semplice.com
Cognito
Cognito’s brilliant UI shines best after loading with unique illustrations that come to life to display sophisticated motions. This dynamism illustrates the brand’s offering at a glance whilst keeping users intrigued.
Image Credit: www.cognitohq.com/
Tumblr
Tumblr’s UI design also enables users to customise their palettes and views in a manner that works for them.
For example, it provides various options to change page width and the colour palette with options like ‘canary’, ‘vampire’, or ‘ghost’.
As a result, the palette choice can support better readability, satisfy users’ aesthetic preferences, and enhance the speed of navigation.
Image Credit: www.tumblr.com/
Spotify
This music streaming powerhouse’s website exploits colour gradients to convey emotions or highlight a specific feature of their offering. This allows its mobile application to be more engaging and fun to use over extended periods.
Image Credit:www.careerfoundry.com/
While these UI design examples provide a wealth of inspiration, translating them into functional and user-centered interfaces requires a strategic approach. Here’s where partnering with a UI/UX design agency can prove beneficial. Their team of skilled designers and UI/UX specialists can take these design concepts and transform them into user experiences that not only look appealing but also function flawlessly. Agencies can ensure consistency across all design elements, conduct usability testing to identify areas for improvement, and ultimately deliver a polished user interface that aligns with your business goals.
Conclusion
An aesthetically pleasing design cannot really save a UI that’s confusing to navigate.
However, a well-thought-out user experience can be overshadowed by bad visual interface design that makes navigating an application unpleasant.
That being said, both UI and UX design processes need to be executed in tandem and perfectly aligned with user expectations to create a cohesive user experience. And when these elements align in perfect symmetry, the results can only be eye-catching!
While this article explores inspiring UI examples from various companies, understanding the usability heuristics covered in Top 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design will ensure those interfaces are not only beautiful but also user-friendly.
