Create products that fulfil goals and desires, then you will convert customers into life-long admirers.
1. Clarity:
Write with clear language that’s easy-to-understand, and your products will always be in demand.
A reliable way to improve User Experience is to ensure all copy featured across your business’ ecosystem is written in plain English. Keep the content simple and always remember to write in the voice of your target audience across all touchpoints: website, printed collateral, user interface instructions and product packaging.
2. Discoverability:
You can’t sell a product if it’s never uncovered, Search Engine Optimisation will ensure you’re discovered.
The best way for your offering to be discovered is to optimise your website for search engines based on the keywords and terms that your customers use. Discover this by analysing your website’s metrics and by asking your customers. Then calibrate your website’s content accordingly and/or invest in the various Online Marketing channels.
3. Usability:
Evaluate products with usability testing, observe your users behaviour and eliminate guessing! Observing real users’ interacting with your product or service, helps uncover usability blackspots that can be addressed in the next release to improve overall ease-of-use.
4. Narrative:
Every experience should tell a good story, always stay on message to achieve product glory. As humans, we are hard-wired to storytelling. Discover the narrative central to your brand and communicate it across all touch-points throughout the customer experience to generate more awareness.
5. Accessibility:
An experience may differ based on user-ability, widen your audience with good Accessibility. Your website should be perceivable, operable, robust and understandable to users with other-abilities. Know and apply the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and open your online experience to a wider user-base.
6. Aesthetics:
Your experience’s graphics should be a high quality, and applied consistently for a memorable identity. Enhance user experience by designing an appropriate and consistent style and applying this look across all touch-points and service moments. Instrumenting best practices from Graphic Design, like typography, colour and imagery, can help with engaging customers with your brand in the first place and to improve the overall relationship between you and your users through an experience that is instantly recognisable, on brand and pleasing to the eye.
7. Context:
Show you understand your customers voices, by providing them with meaningful choices. Context is everything! The best user experiences take into account user goals and an understanding of the key moments in their experience. Provide users with meaningful and actionable choices based on what the activity they are currently engaged in. These will ensure there’s an immersive and organic flow through the experience.
8. Flow:
Empower your users with agency, don’t slow them down with delays or mediocrity. The best experiences are when a user successfully reaches their goal. It is important to eliminate any obstacles, tension or delays. Use storyboarding to sketch and illustrate your users optimal journey before you touch any technology. Just like when we are immersed in a good film or book, flow through a website or an application keeps the users immersed in the experience and on track towards reaching their goal.
9. Emotional Response:
Resonate with your customers by changing their lives, making an impact that helps them to thrive. Strive to build products and services that evoke a positive emotional response with your users and customers. To achieve this, understand customer wants and needs, and user goals and mental models. Conduct user testing early and often to look for problems with interaction during the experience. Match customer expectations with user delight. Know your constituents, make a difference by improving and adding meaning to their lives through your brand and offering.
10. Consistency:
All parts of the Experience should look and feel, like they’re from the same family, brand and theme. Content may be king, but Consistency is queen. All component parts of the overall experience, every moment, interaction, artefact and touch-point should have a consistent look and feel and be recognisably and uniquely associated with your overarching brand. Zoom out and evaluate Consistency across your company’s ecosystem. Connect the customer lifecycle with the user experience and unify your total brand experience, making it more holistic, harmonic and end-to-end.
11. Playfulness:
An experience is all about engaging someone, make it memorable by injecting some fun. When all is said and done, as humans we value experiences that help us to successfully reach our goals. However, it is also important that we help the user to enjoy the experience of reaching their goals – and this is where fun comes into the equation. Think outside the box to create new and novel experiences that take the monotony out of repetitive tasks and engage the user in different ways. Try gamification, personalisation, customisation and dynamically changing content to turn up the fun levels and have users coming back for more!
