Iterative user experience design

In this blog, Giz Edwards, Sales and Marketing Executive at digital agency Hiyield, and Launchpad alumni, explains why it's so important to consider user experience when developing any web-based products.

In the start-up world, the programming or coding of your digital product is important, there is no questioning that. However, in our experience, no matter how good the lines of code in your product are, you will find that at some point in the development journey you will need to make some improvements to the look and feel of the product too.

Improving the user experience (UX) does not just mean that the user journey will be more seamless, but it also means that your users will be more likely to recommend the product to others. Win-win!

The UX of your product is not only about the look and feel. It can also be about the smaller design details that improve the flow of the user journey. A great starting point for investigating the UX of your product is to ask questions to your users. Find out what the pain points of the product are, and what they crave would be available for them. Remember to bear in mind that there can be a thin line between a greater UX and feature creep.

Data-driven design work is extremely valuable to make the right design choices for your product. A great example of this is if your product is a website that converts users to customers, then a good UX design choice would be to reduce the number of clicks needed to sell a product. Or making the sale process easier to identify for the user.

UX design changes are more successful with smaller iterative loops of development. This is called an Agile methodology. This way you are able to implement a change and see the impact of that choice. If the change worked for the better, you know that the design choice was the right direction to go. If the results show it's the wrong choice, you can easily revert to the previous iteration. However, if you made larger changes, you may not know which design elements were good and which were bad this could result in losing money, time, and racking up design debt.

To sum this up, figure out what the pain points are, real data from your users will be valuable. Implement the changes iteratively. Decide if the changes are positive or negative, and then action those decisions. If you follow those easy steps, then you should have a more user-friendly experience for your product.

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