What is UX?
UX stands for User Experience, which if to be explained in terms of designing is nothing but a subset of Design thinking. Everything depends on UX when it comes to designing an interface for apps or web.
While designing an interface of any soft of app there is a purpose for each and every element that exists over the application. That single entity’s position, size, padding, alignment, breathing space around it etc. are some of the basic parameters I would say define the user’s experience. A simplest example would be if your company has designed an App which is new in the market since the design is new, many users might feel your app functionality confusing, the smartest thing you would do is add a support page, chatbot or FAQ/Wiki about it, but another detail designers tend to forget is placing the button that links to the Helpdesk/Support. In worst case scenarios a user cannot understand your app as well as can’t find the support page too. Majority people in these matters would uninstall your app and tweet something horrible about it rather than finding the help for it somewhere.
Basic tips to improve User’s experience
- Always make sure the important elements are clearly visible and user doesn’t have navigate much for those, you can add a featured column on the front or add a recent section where frequently used features are pinned.
- Never make dramatic changes in design of your project. Users are comfortable with what they see regularly. For example a guy who reads the sports section of a newspaper daily on the front page would get really annoyed if the newspaper agency decided to move it to page 35.
- If you want to make changes make them slowly this helps you planning multiple app updates as well as the user adapts over time and stays happy.
- Try to make complex parts effortless on the look. If there’s a part of your app which requires active user participation continuously then keeping a light UI looking easy to the eyes can help a lot.
- Add a dynamic preloader, don’t let the user distract even when something is loading for a while. For suggestions you can always add quickly changing tips that are helpful for the user.
On what extent does User experience makes an impact
There are various applications one uses and the user would simply love and smooth and fast experience that they expect from you since they’re using everyday no matter how much you charge them or provide inconvenience when it comes to the freeloaders. For example if we take Spotify as our example they have as of now 180+ million users (free and subscribed both, mostly freeloaders). Talking about the statistics, around 200 Million people have subscribed to Amazon Prime that provides Amazon Prime Music and Prime Video and their delivery perks. Around 65% of these users use Spotify for free as well as own Amazon Prime. Yet, if you notice a freeloader who owns Amazon Prime still uses Spotify’s music service for free even though they pay for Amazon Music for an ad free experience. Both have almost same count of music library, yet any day an average Spotify user would not use Amazon music rather listen to lousy ads by Spotify.
That is how much difference a good User Experience makes to your market. You could compare Spotify to any other music app and yet find out they’ve better side perks and still not convince them to switch their music service. If you provide someone the best experience possible then a user might think of it is as the only choice and not run towards the alternatives of it.
