"Let's make sure your digital platform satisfies its users and turns them into loyal visitors."
Murat Usta, PhD
UX Design/Research Expert
Any area of a digital platform that slows down, discourages or prevents desirable user behavior is a UX problem. Solving such problems quickly provides better business outcomes.
Most platforms want their visitors to spend more time and more money. They also want visitors to share more information, become members, and recommend the platforms to others. Yet, it is practically impossible for users to show all the desirable behaviors all the time. Thus, UX design must prioritize desirable tasks based on business strategy. Then, systems must be designed to encourage desirable behaviors of strategic importance to the company.
Business strategy directly impacts what desirable behaviors a company shall encourage through their UX design. For example, a startup company may value increasing user signups the most. To this startup funded by investors that value user growth, other behaviors such as purchasing are not as important as user signups yet. Therefore, any kind of UX friction that discourages user signups is a UX problem of vital importance to this company.
Any area of a digital platform that slows down, discourages or prevents desirable user behavior is a UX problem.
To identify UX problems, desirable user behaviors shall be analyzed one by one. We must keep in mind that different behaviors can apply to different sections of the digital platform. Thus, a clear vision that isolates UX problems given the business context as well as user motivation and goals is essential. Our PRI (Prioritize, Research, Identify) Framework will help you determine the most important UX problems easily.
Determine user behaviors of vital strategic importance to the digital platform. List and prioritize these behaviors based on business strategy.
Determine a user's journey from the beginning to the end while performing a strategically important user behavior. Document the journey using both objective and subjective measures.
Review the data to identify areas or tasks that cause uncertainty, unwillingness, fatigue or dissatisfaction among users. Determine all UX factors that reduce desirable user behaviors.
First, you may want to further confirm if the identified UX problem really causes worse user behaviors. The easiest way to assess this is to conduct a controlled experiment (A/B test). You randomly split a group of users into two groups. One group is assigned to the current version of the platform. The other group is assigned to a version of the platform with the UX problem removed. If you observe that removing the UX problem improves behavior, you confirm that the UX problem is accurately identified. Doing this experiment also allows you to measure how much removing the UX problem improves business results.
Second, you will want to create the best design to fix the UX problem. If you already have a clear idea about how this problem can be fixed, you can develop a few design alternatives that will improve your UX. Next, you test each one of these design alternatives against your existing system to see how much improvement each design provides. You choose the one that provides the best outcome. If you do not have a clear idea about how to fix the problem, you can conduct benchmark studies to analyze what your competitors are doing. You can also do some qualitative studies (e.g., talk-aloud studies, focus groups) to understand what really hinders visitors from doing the desirable behaviors that are of vital importance to your company.
Any areas of a digital platform that slows down, discourages or prevents desirable user behavior is a UX problem. To identify UX problems, you must first identify which user behaviors are of strategic importance to your platform. Then, you must critically analyze a user's journey on your platform when performing such behaviors. Review the user journey data to identify areas or tasks that cause uncertainty, unwillingness, fatigue or dissatisfaction among users. Conduct further research to eliminate such frictions to improve business results with better UX design.
Contact us to audit your platform, identify and solve UX problems that stifle your business' growth.
"Let's make sure your digital platform satisfies its users and turns them into loyal visitors."
Murat Usta, PhD
UX Design/Research Expert