3 Truths Regarding User Experience
The user experience on any medium is usually the most important thing at the end of the day for any business, be it a night club, a mobile application, or a remodeled bathroom. The individual who uses it needs to be able to confidently use it in a convenient way in order to maximize its full utility.
In the digital realm, user experience is generally the one thing that is reviewed most often in the mainstream. If your product has a poor user experience, then that user will be less likely to keep using the product. This is plain and simple cause and effect.
The issue revolving around user experience is measuring that experience. Often times this is a qualitative discussion, which can be a bit foreign to designers who may in most instances prefer quantitative analysis. In the end, the qualitative data is delivered in a quantitative form.
The following will attempt to ascertain just three truths, among many, regarding user experience. Please join in on the comment section if you, as the reader, can help this list grow!
Defining Your Metrics:
Categorizing the features of your product, whether it is a website or mobile application, is the first step to knowing and identifying what and how the user experience is. An article by Jeff Sauro out of Measuring Usability explored the benchmarks of UX metrics.
He begins with discussing and defining the “task completion rate,” which measures how much and if a task was completed while in use. For instance, if a user accesses a social networking application and decides to update his or her status, that action or ‘task’ can be measured if the user completes it. A high completion rate means the application or website function worked well enough for the user not to experience problems and accomplish his or her goal. Sauro and his team at Measuring Usability have determined that a task completion rate of 71% or higher is “good.” As experts in their field, those in the industry generally agree with their statistics.
Sauro and his team also rated errors per task. This is a crucial bug issue that ought to be overcome with a simple automated and agile testing process. The team at Measuring Usability rate a good error rate at 0.7%. Since these folks are smarter than the average writer, they have gone ahead and produced a very well written explanation of how to measure errors.
Smashing Magazine’s Dmitry Fadeyev wrote a piece on some measurables, one of which discussed usage patterns. Defining your products usage patterns can greatly increase the identification of UX variables specific to the product.
Fadeyev also cites a study done by Jakob Nielsen out of the Nielsen Norman Group about the extensiveness of user testing, which helps to define the user metrics of your product. Nielsen found that “Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.” So when defining your metrics, do not go overboard:
(Source: Nielsen Norman Group)
As you can tell, an immediate problem will make itself clear after the first five users notice the issue. Anything after that just reiterates the fact the product has an issue.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness is how well the web application or mobile application responds to commands. It is crucial that the product responds not just well, but just as fast, if not faster, than the user. Consider for instance the smartphone, and how older ones inevitably lose response time because of all the data it has to manage over time.
(A dramatization of poor responsiveness)
One thing that can occur is lag, which by any standard is a first world problem of the grandest expression in terms of menial inconvenience. Lag is when a user performs or instructs a command and then instead of the device following the command immediately, it waits a moment to complete the task. Despite this being annoying, it is all too common with older devices running upgraded software.
(A Typical Reaction to Updated Software)
Consider for a moment if you have an android device purchased just a year ago. There has been one major update already, from Jelly Bean to Kit Kat. The newer phones will be optimized to handle input functions, while the older may experience lag. The same thing happened when iPhone devices, particularly older models, upgraded from iOS 6 to iOS 7. The responsiveness was certainly diminished because the older models could not handle what was optimized for newer devices. When building an application or website the best optimization of responsiveness is somewhere in between the most updated and what the general market is using (which are generally older devices as there are more of those than not).
(If this GIF is running smoothly it means that your device has, depending on data and broadband, good responsiveness).
Listen to the Masses!
Those reviews in an app store, for instance, contain value. Excluding all the useless trolls and empty ratings, one can find a bevy of information to better improve the UX of a product. There are two realms in this regard: problems with the device, which only the manufacturer can address, and problems with applications which developers can address because it can be a smaller entity than the devices their products run on.
One recent example of highly effective UX improvements is with Windows Phone. Microsoft does not necessarily own a huge chunk of the smartphone market, but it is certainly growing into a mid level competitor, sort of like the expansion of Kia and Hyundai in the motoring world. Due to the relatively small community (but will be inevitably huge), the Windows Phone team can directly hear the thoughts of their users in order to develop better performance on their products.
The Windows Phone community is very active on Reddit, and as it turns out the folks running the Windows Phone project have appealed to the users to make a better product. In fact, Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president and manager for the Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft, has already done two reddit AMA’s (ask me anything). He addressed operational issues and offered users an idea of what is to come, while users offered ideas and concerns that he and his team ought to address. You better believe that team is very interested in the comments and concerns and have obliged to many consumer interests, including a voice assistant named Cortana and a Notification drop down menu as a result.
Application developers are also active with the Windows Phone. Due to a perceived lack of mainstream applications for the Windows Phone, third party applications have sprouted up. One instance includes SnapChat, who, for no expressed reason whatsoever, have not developed an application for Windows Phone. With a void in supply and overwhelming demand, one production and development firm, 6Studio, has developed their own SnapChat app called 6Snap. For all intents and purposes, it is an exact copy of SnapChat but misses a few key features and at the same time adds some very cool ones like Snap replay. In any case, 6Studio does listen, at least partially, to the user community because the voice is louder when the market is a little smaller. 6Studio has to listen to them, because those users are their only users.
(A Windows User’s Paradise)
Android and iOS have their own forums on their websites, but have failed to be as interested in user opinion on a democratic scale like Windows Phone on reddit. Since this is the case, the Windows Phone is growing much faster at the mid level class, which competes with older Android and iOS models, and new iPhone C models.
What Else Can We Say?
At the end of the day the user experience will determine exposure and engagement of a product. It does not have to be on a digital medium. If your toilet works as instructed, then the user experience will include longevity, comfort, and ease. Now, if you’re an American in Japan, your user experience in their restrooms will be like the user experience of a first generation iPhone running iOS 7:
(American User Experience with this Japanese Toilet is going to be bad)
By: ParadigmNext http://paradigmnext.com
Google+: https://plus.google.com/+ParadigmNextChicago
ParadigmNEXT, Inc. is a digital agency headquartered in Chicagoland. We provide branding, identity, integrated marketing, social media strategy, art direction, web-design & development, startup incubation, commercial video production, product development, and commercial storefront development services to a wide array of clients ranging from bootstrapped startups to successful longstanding companies.