It was Don Norman who defined ‘User Experience’ as encompassing all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products. The field of user experience represents an expansion and extension of the field of usability, to include the holistic perspective of how a person feels about using a system. The focus is on pleasure and value as well as on performance.
The best user experience practices promote the improvement of the interaction quality and perceptions of the product and any related services. To achieve this simply means creating a website/system that works as expected (or better) and meets the user’s needs at the right time and place. Highly specialised applications can easily fall into a trap of using highly technical jargon that only experts may understand and that can take away the pleasure and compromise the value of the experience for the user. An exceptional user experience speaks to the user with words they understand and can act on.
Signing up team members for a UX (User Experience) design course is something worth investing in because it aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the organisation’s products or brand, and improves the possibilities of new customer acquisition. Another course consideration for the same team is to study a UI (User Interface) qualification which would serve as an advantage because it is a common language that everyone will be discussing at some point in the processes of design and development. Some of the organisations which have established UX design as a pivotal element of their business strategies have succeeded in transforming followers into ardent fans who ultimately promote their products and services. This adds value by assisting companies to achieve their objectives.
Organisations are currently placing great emphasis on the UX factors that impact the business’s performance, and anything that does not is regarded as a waste of time and resources. These factors, which include accessibility, speed and usability, are analysed to identify areas that need actionable tweaks and enhancements. It is after the implementation of these modifications that the product’s user experience should show improvement when re-analysed. Poor performance of a website, at any course of the interaction, has the potential to undermine every aspect of the whole experience between the computer and the human.
Getting the human-computer interaction right provides the product/brand with a much better chance of succeeding, which will, in turn, contribute to the bottom line of providing the ultimate experience for the users.
