How UX Design Firms Can Ensure Their Designs Deliver the Impact They Expect?
UX design teams aim to ensure the design and usability of a given application meet the highest standards of customer experience. Research, usability testing, and sophisticated design techniques are applied at various stages of building the application to ensure the user gets exactly the outcome they want easily and efficiently. Research has previously revealed that organizations can realize a 9,900% ROI for every dollar that they spend on providing an excellent UX.
That’s why there is a growing number of specialised UX design firms offering turnkey solutions to businesses for the applications on the table. They offer complete research for brand positioning, user likes and dislikes (personas), and prototypes. They facilitate testing designs with defined user teams and following compliances to ensure the application is easy to use, good to look at, and would be able to convince the customer to use the application again.
But while it’s important to ensure all that, the focus on application performance monitoring and performance engineering, in general, is a must. At the end of the day, the ease of navigation and aesthetics can only go so far. The application needs to be fast, available, and reliable as the usage grows – precisely why the performance and scalability considerations should be baked into the process from the start.
The Focus on the Core Elements Should Remain Intact
Understanding User’s Needs and Wants
Understanding the user’s needs is a critical step in the UX design process. UX design firms need to conduct detailed research and analysis of possible target audiences using surveys, interviews, and usability tests to get a data-driven insight into what the users need from a product or a service.
User personas are then created to represent the target audience, and simulated user journeys are embarked on to understand what and how a user wishes to use an application, along with the identification of problem areas that could need improvement. Extensive user testing is conducted to observe how the user could interact with the application, service, or product.
By understanding the users correctly, UX firms create products that have a look, feel, and performance customized to a user’s expectation, preference, and behavior, leading to better CX.
Usability and Accessibility Are Critical
Usability is termed as how easy the application is to use and how accurately it meets the needs and requirements of the user. To achieve usability of a good standard means that UX design firms must ensure that the look and feel of the application are pleasing to the eye. The interactivity should be intuitive, and navigation to different areas and functionality of the application should be easy. The UX design should be such that the user’s confusion and frustration levels are kept to a minimum throughout the usage life cycle within the application.
The UX firms must ensure accessibility is a mandated criterion for all customer experience compliances. Applications should be easy to use regardless of the abilities or disabilities of the user. Accessibility audits should be conducted on the product to identify accessibility pitfalls and barriers.
Accessibility web content guidelines (WCAG) should be followed, and accessibility design principles must be introduced into the UX process. Teams at UX firms should be sensitized and trained on accessibility and inclusive design. They should adhere to standards such as the ADA and AODA guidelines that ensure that applications and products are accessible to all.
The Focus on Visual Design
Visual design is a guideline in UX that involves creating and using graphic elements to enhance the look and feel of an application or a digital product. These elements could include color, font, layout, and images. A good visual design ensures that the UX of an application is visually appealing to users.
UX firms must ensure consistency and clarity across the entire application and its different screens. The visual design must align with the branding of the company that is offering this application or service and should consider user demographics, age, gender, and culture while designing the various components of the interface. Again, the accessibility factor plays a role in the process of complete visual design. Top-class visual designs are also innovative and unique.
But Performance Should Matter More Than Ever
Regardless of how enhanced the UX is of an application, digital product, or service, its actual performance decides how everything will play out in the hands of the user. Slow speed, sluggish UI interactivity, and delayed or “laggy” screen refreshes negatively impact the UX of an application. Consistency is another crucial factor that impacts CX.
The performance of an application includes the speed and responsiveness that the application displays across the user’s entire life cycle within the application. It includes the ability of the application to keep delivering those speed and response levels as the number of users grows and their usage scales. In fact, performance is the final, and perhaps the most critical, metric that defines the CX level of an application.
But what decides performance?
This could be due to poor design, inadequate infrastructure provisioning, sub-optimal testing, and outdated technology choices. Badly written code and SQL queries can also slow down the entire process of ensuring great UX, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction of the user.
Connectivity issues between the endpoint and the cloud could also play a major factor in the level of CX delivered. Slow response times of results of user inputs and reporting can irritate a user while using an application, reducing the UX rating of that application. Poor data plans with slow internet connections can be detrimental to the pillar of accessibility as well.
Performance matters, regardless of technical and graphic design sophistication. If an application performs slowly, it will be considered badly designed and unusable in the eyes of the customer. Contrarily, an application that responds quickly to a user’s input and journey can increase their engagement and fulfill UX directives.
The Case for Performance Engineering In UX Design
Application performance monitoring is crucial in UX. Therefore, it’s essential that UX design firms incorporate performance engineering into their process. appNeura is positioned perfectly with its varied capabilities in mobile user experience monitoring, web browser testing, and synthetic monitoring to add the value of performance in UX design.
With appNeura’s synthetic monitoring, the application whose UX has been implemented can be tested under simulated conditions to learn how the application will perform under different conditions. Load testing and tuning for mobile application performance can detect performance issues that can be fixed before the actual rollout.
Tracking key metrics for performance optimization during the UX design process using key indicators such as response time, load time, and user engagement can introduce performance to the very core of the process. Besides, root cause analysis can expedite the detection and mitigation of interactive areas with downgraded performance, hence, overhauling application performance to satisfactory levels.
The consistency of performance of any UX deployment can be tested across platforms, browsers, and devices using our web testing capabilities. This ensures a large demographic of users can be tested for before deployment – ensuring UX implementation is consistent across platforms.
The appNeura Advantage
In today’s world of high performance, evolving customer expectations, and cut-throat competition, UX firms need a USP to put themselves ahead of the rest of the market. Achieving top-of-the-line UX can only happen if performance engineering is part of the UX design process. Being able to furnish a UX in line with high performance is key to retaining customers.
Customer relationships will reflect significant improvement as clients are looking not only for a great design but a solution that also takes the required performance into consideration. By offering a touch of class in UX powered by great performance, the standing of the UX firm with the client will improve, and there is a very high likelihood of repeat business.
With appNeura, UX design firms can advocate for performance-driven UX and differentiate themselves from the rest of the fluff that exists in the market of UX design. Get in touch with our experts today to learn how appNeura can power up your UX design process.