Did you know? As per Walkers’ Customers 2020’ report, customer experience is likely to take over price and product as the key brand differentiators. In a separate study by Forrester, it was found that there is a 400% chance of visit-to-lead conversion if apps have a superior user experience.
Businesses are driven by how users behave around their products. This is also guided by the way their products are designed. Customer-centric apps, therefore, need to understand that building apps is one thing, but designing them as per customer demands is another.
Stated below are a few ways to achieve a better user experience with your apps.
Dive right into UX research first
Your app design would be incomplete without this step since user behavior around an app decides the improvements it requires. Basically, UX research saves money, improves the end-user experience, and improves the chances to make improvements and adjustments during the development stage. UX research comprises different steps- desk research, expert evaluation, competitors analysis, in-depth interview, behavioral analysis, Heatmap analysis, product idea validation.
Hiring Users for feedback
One of the best practices adopted by best app development companies is to set a target group and higher them to use their products. The size of the respondents can range from 5 to 20 depending on the project.
Planning for the design
Keeping the UX and the clients in mind, one of the best practices includes looping the clients in every stage of the design. This avoids extra costs and iterations at the end of the process. Additionally, the end product is as per market standards and foolproof. It has been witnessed that such processes reduce the turnaround time by 4X and improve cost optimization by 70%.
Execution
One of the most important aspects of any project cycle, the execution stage decides the success or failure of a project. It is, therefore, an important task to conduct thorough testing of the software product at this stage. However, experts like aQb choose to test the product performance at every stage of the development cycle so that there are no last-minute changes to be done, affecting the market-turnaround time and the quality of delivery.
Now that we have discussed the best practices in the various stages of the development cycle, it’s time to talk about a few more aspects that are part of the cycle but need separate attention.
The importance of in-depth interviews
A UX research will be incomplete without in-depth interviews of IDIs. It is a qualitative research method, which involves individually interviewing the potential users of the product. It is done to understand the interests of the users. This step primarily helps in achieving the following milestones that are integral to the research stage:
- Understand who the users are what their needs and complaints are
- If they are facing any sort of issues
- Monitoring their behavior around the product, along with their actions and experiences
- Shape products to suit the target users
The Importance of Expert Evaluation
But before that, we have to understand what it exactly is. Expert evaluation is a review of the product by experts who don the user’s hat and walk through the various functions of the product themselves. An important part of the UX research process, expert evaluation is of the following types:
Heuristic evaluation: It is a usability engineering method that helps in evaluating issues in a user interface design. This process involves experts who inspect the interface’s compliance as per the predetermined usability principles.
Conducting heuristic markup: This is a more traditional or informal way of reviewing in which evaluators spend a couple of hours going through the product and doing a set of tasks to ensure that it performs optimally.
Cognitive walkthrough: It was formulated to check whether the product could be easily used by new users. This is a very cost-effective approach and can be performed by anyone.
Conversion-centric evaluation: This method is used to estimate the percentage of users who take the desired action, for instance, purchase something from the website, register on a website, or sign up for a subscription.
Key recommendations
It is best to follow the agile methodology of handling an app design project because that allows businesses to keep clients in the loop at every designing stage. This way, there is no scope of error at the end of the process. Some of the other benefits include:
- Understanding the areas in the product that needs improvement
- Analyzing how the product meets users’ needs
- Whether or not users accept the product
- Choosing the best fit if there are two versions of a single solution
- Testing the concept to see the reaction of the target audience
Designing an app to get the desired results requires a unique blend of expertise and experience which can only be provided by established app design companies. aQb and Tintedtale, with 13 years of legacy experience, are the best app designing companies that fit the role of both consultants and developers.
Call us now for all your app designing questions.
