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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money?
This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you’ll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You’ll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more.
The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems.
As we progress, you’ll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You’ll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book.
By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 390
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Fixing Bad UX Designs
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
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Foreword
Many books talk about how user experience work can be done—assuming that there are no barriers, blockers, or stakeholders who prefer to hear their own voices over those of their users.
Not so this book.
Instead, Lisandra Maioli takes this challenge head on, introducing hundreds of tried-and-trusted tactics for designing great user experiences, along with the strategies needed to ensure that your users are heard in your organization. Implementing the ideas contained in these pages will allow you to affect real change.
It's no surprise that the wisdom contained in this book is so broad.
A decade of Lisandra's experience as a journalist and UX researcher includes working with start-ups and multinationals across three continents. Her real-world examples cover every area of UX—from user research to prototyping, data and analytics, marketing, team balance, and communication. Her experience means no topic of importance to a modern UX professional has been left untouched.
What this book leaves out is a single proscribed methodology for success. Instead, it gives you a powerful suite of processes and tools, explains their benefits in simple, accessible language, and combines them with practical real-world examples. It talks about when and how to use each process, but ultimately leaves you with control over which methodologies to use to solve the unique user problems your organization faces.
No work like this can be created without a passion for creating and improving remarkable user experiences. That passion has taken Lisandra from Brazil to Silicon Valley to Ireland, where I was fortunate enough to work with her, and onward to the Netherlands. It has taken her from journalism to marketing, and from marketing to her eventual home of UX—the only place where Lisandra’s unique ability to connect users with meaningful solutions shines through.
If you care about making your customers' voices the most powerful voice in your organization, then there is no doubt that you should study the words contained herein. It has everything you need to ensure that your customers are heard, appreciated, and understood.
Study well, grow wise, and challenge yourself to be better.
Dave KearneyFounder / CEO of FluidUI.com
Contributors
About the author
Lisandra Maioli is an Italian-Brazilian journalist with certification in UX (General Assembly LA), post-graduate Diploma in Marketing (UC Berkeley), in Digital Marketing (UCLA), in Interactive Digital Medias (Senac SP), and in Digital-Cultural Journalism (PUC SP). She has about 2 decades of international and multidisciplinary experience in Digital Communications in different roles, working for different companies and clients based in Brazil, the US, Italy, Ireland, China, Germany, and the Netherlands.
About the reviewers
Basil Miller is the cofounder of Devlight and an Ivano-Frankivsk based leading Android developer. Since 2014, Android developers all over the world keep spectating his progress and using free products developed in the role of an open source Android UI widgets provider. Those libraries have reached the top of the popular trend charts kept for a long time. Being a cofounder and developer, Basil is able and willing to collaborate in work on the new business projects and start-ups. Also, it is easy to contact Basil in order to involve him into the projects as a mobile development consultant.
Brian Sheridan is an expert in UX research. He is an associate editor of UXPA and writes on UX among other things for the Fluid UI blog. He is a lecturer at Maynooth University where he was a supervisor on major research projects for over 10 years. He is part of the team at Fluid UI which helps users to create wireframes and prototypes in minutes and unlock their creativity.
Peter is a passionate user experience designer, researcher, frequent conference speaker, and best-selling author. As the principal of far Zenith, he has over nine years of success in UX, having worked for big brands, such as Amazon, Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, or British Gas. He was also leading the UX team at the world’s biggest online gambling company—The Stars Group Inc. If you want to learn more, visit his UX blog—the Kaizen-UX.com. Oh, and before we forget, he loves cats!
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Fixing Bad UX Designs
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Foreword
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewers
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
Understanding UX and its Importance
UX is present everywhere
Bad UX is bad for your business
The ROI of fixing bad UX design
Getting stakeholders involved
Metrics and KPI's
Summary
Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies
Identifying stakeholders and their needs
Prioritization map
RACI matrix
Stakeholder matrix
Interviewing stakeholders
Understanding users and their needs
Investigation
Heuristic evaluation
User research methodologies
20 UX methods in brief
Screening and recruiting
Guerrilla research
Creating personas
Step 1—Identify behavioral and demographic variables
Step 2—map interviewees into variables
Step 3—Identify key patterns of behavior
Step 4—List relevant characteristics and objectives
Step 5—Check the entire set of person to eliminate redundancies
Step 6—Develop the narrative
Step 7—Determine types of people
Understanding the competitors
User journey and touch points
Defining the challenges and project goals
Summary
Exploring Potential UX Solutions
Organizing the reports
Be visual
Analytics
Heuristic evaluation
User feedback
Finding solutions
Design, test, iterate, repeat
Summary
Increasing Conversion with UX
Identifying conversion issues
Previous analysis
Quantitative/data analysis
Google Analytics
Mixpanel
Hotjar
AppSee
Chartbeat
Inspectlet
Woopra
Formisimo
Lucky Orange
Website Grader by HubSpot
Other tools
Research and interviewing your users
Doing usability tests
Doing A/B tests
Building responsive and accessible websites
Helping your users save time
Making your user think as little as possible and save as much information as possible
Leaving the main function of your site prominent
Improving the loading time
Following design trends
Using good call-to-action
Summary
Using UI and Content for Better Communication
Identifying UI and content issues
The importance of good UI for a great UX
UI elements for good UX communication
Minding the hierarchy of the UI elements
Choosing the appropriate typography
Headline
Body of text
Background
Responsive typography
Fonts
Picking the right color scheme
Using consistent iconography
Content strategy and microcopy
Content analysis
Strategic recommendations
Editorial and tone of voice guide
Organization
SEO
Copy and microcopy for UX
The functional value of microtexts
Tips for good microcopy
Summary
Considering Accessibility As Part of the UX
What accessibility is and its importance
The WCAG documentation
Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust
Different demands in accessibility
Accessible as part of the universal design
Accessibility as an inclusive UX
Accessibility analysis
Automated accessibility tools
The importance of colors
Color blindness
Other disabilities
What about apps?
Accessibility and IoT
Good practices
Screen readers
Focused tips
More accessibility tips
Real examples and case studies
Fukuoka City Subway
The de Young Museum
Oxo
Tuva
Barclays
Tesco
Legal and General
Awake Labs' Reveal
AccessNow
TellMe TV
eSight
Summary
Improving Physical Experiences
UX can be applied everywhere
How to improve ATMs
Usability
Simplifying an elevator panel (but not much)
Improving car panel design
Creating magic experience in parks
Improving boarding passes
Bus stop as part of the user journey
Redesigning urinals to encourage men to wash their hands
When offline meets online experiences
Summary
Improving IA for Better Navigation
IA as part of UX
IA and different fields
Biblioteconomy
Cognitive psychology
Architecture
How to identify IA issues
Content tree
Site maps
Flowchart
Navigational flows
Wireframes
Content inventory
Navigation schema and nomenclature
Task flow analysis
Using card sorting and tree testing to fix bad IA
Card sorting
The card sorting process
Content selection and card preparation
Tree testing
Summary
Prototyping and Validating UX Solutions
Testing, validating, and refining
Conceptual prototype
Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototype
Medium-fidelity (mid-fi) prototypes
High-fidelity (hi-fi) prototypes
Choosing the right tool to create prototypes
Prototyping tools
Paper
Fluid UI
POP by Marvel
Marvel app
Axure RP
InVision app
InVision Studio
Adobe XD
Zeplin
UXPin
Figma
Flinto
Framer
Origami Studio
Principle
Balsamiq
JustinMind
Proto.io
Sketch app
Running tests with prototypes
Running usability tests
Sample users
Interactive prototype with friendly test features
A facilitator
Observers
Tools to run usability tests
Lookback
WhatUsersDo
User testing
UsabilityHub
Skype/GoToMeeting
Other tools
Five ways to do mobile usability testing
A third person with a camera
Application that records the mobile screen
Sharing the phone screen with your computer
Support coupled to the cell phone
Stand with camera resting on the table
Tips to run usability testing with a prototyping tool
Use realistic content
Use realistic data
Designing your well thought out tests
Moderate or not moderate?
Learn from failures as well as successes
Do not interfere in the middle of the test
Avoid resolving ad hoc bugs
Summary
Implementing UX Solutions
Communicating the project
UX canvas
Lean UX Canvas
Creating documentation
Annotated wireframes
Prototype
System state inventory
Sitemaps/app maps
Flows
Storyboards
User stories
Testing for QA 
UX's work does not end in technology
QA needs to take into account the context
Summary
Measuring UX Solutions
Measuring UX
The relationship between UX research, design, and analytics
Planning
Approaches
UX KPIs
Usability
Engagement
Conversion
SUS (System Usability Scale)
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
Framework H.E.A.R.T.
Defining UX metrics
Tools and methodologies
Google Analytics
Conversion rate (CR)
Bounce rate/Bounce rate
Exit rate/Exit rate
Average session time/Session duration
Page views per session/Page per session
Sessions/Sessions
New visitors versus recurring
Clicks/Click Through Rate (CTR)
Average ticket/Average order value
Crossing qualitative with quantitative
Preparing reports for the stakeholders
Creating reports
Summary
Keeping Up to Date
Usability.gov
Nielsen Norman Group
UX Magazine
UXBooth
UXMatters
Smashing Magazine
UX Blog
UXaday
Designmodo
UX Collective
UXMyths
UX Checklists
UX Forums
Designer Hangout
UX Design Community
UXPA
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
The challenge that most UX designers and product owners face is to ensure that the UX of products and services is user friendly. Some common issues are simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and so on. In this book, we will address all these issues through real examples and main overall problems and solutions on accessibility, conversion, content, and UI, just to name a few. You will learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs.
As you progress through the book, you will learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and other similar concepts. You will also learn about UX design tools with the projects covered in the book. By the end of the book, you will be armed with the knowledge to fix bad designs and ensure great customer satisfaction for their applications.
By understanding business and user needs, you will be able to focus on what exactly should be fixed. It is important to have a clear idea of what the problems are that your UX efforts aim to solve and understand what are the solutions the company provides. With the UX issues identified and project challenges defined and agreed, you will need to turn these findings from user research into potential solutions, listing assumptions and presenting the ideas to the stakeholders in a clear and effective way.
In the second part of the book, you will see specific UX issues, mostly common, and how to fix them through different methodologies and using a variety of tools. You will learn how to increase conversion with UX, how to use UI elements and content for better communication, improving IA for better navigation, besides considering accessibility as part of the UX and also thinking about user experience in public environments.
By the end of the book, you will know how to create better documentation that communicates well with other teams, and also, you will know how to test and validate the potential design solutions before the implementation. Closing the full UX circle, you will be confident to measure the results of the UX fixes and prove to the stakeholders how the focus on UX impacts the success of the product/service and how important it is to keep investing in fixing bad UX Designs.
Who this book is for
This book is mainly for UX professionals, but also for product owners, project managers, entrepreneurs, and even designers and developers who would like to learn how to solve problems with the existing UX design.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding UX and Its Importance, introduces you to the importance of UX for the success of services and products. You also understood why UX matters for your product or service, what ROI, Metrics, and KPIs of UX are, and what is the importance of getting stakeholders involved. Once it is clear to the company and stakeholders the importance of applying UX to the services and/or products offered by the company and how it can impact business in itself, it is time to further understand what the needs of stakeholders and users are. This next phase of the project will help you define the MVP of the project better and focus on what really matters to the user and understand how to fix bad UX designs.
Chapter 2, Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies, shows how to identify UX issues and understand the project challenges by interviewing stakeholders, using different user research methodologies, doing comparative competitor analysis, and designing user journeys and writing problem statements. For each project, you might use a combination of different methodologies in order to find the UX issues. Although it can be interesting to plan which methods will be used to ensure that they will be accommodated into the budget, it is common to feel like you need to use other methods after each test.
Chapter 3, Exploring Potential UX Solutions, presents the importance of putting the findings together in order to analyze them and start thinking about the potential solutions. By having these findings organized, it is easier to work on design potential solutions, starting with paper sketches, moving to wireframes (low, mid, and hi-fi) and to clickable prototypes, which will be tested, validated, and iterated.
Chapter 4, Increasing Conversion with UX, focuses on how to fix UX issues that are dropping the conversion of a website or app, impacting the business results. You will learn how to identify conversion issues by doing a UX Analysis, such as quantitative/data analysis and deeply understanding the users by performing research, interview, and usability tests. Besides testing solutions to fix the issues you have identified, you will also see practical examples of how to fix UX issues by considering to build responsive and accessible websites, improving loading time, saving time for your user, and following design trends.
Chapter 5, Using UI and Content for Better Communication, presents the importance of content and UI for a great user experience and how these elements, when badly designed, can create big issues for a clear communication between your website, app, product, or service with your user. I hope you could notice how all these aspects and elements, such as hierarchy, typography, iconography, color, copy, and such, are interconnected and influence each other. Although content strategy and text creation can be the job of copywriter or the choice of color scheme, typography, iconography can be the job of a UI designer, as a UXer, you should influence those decisions and ensure that all of them will allow great user experience. Understanding these aspects in depth will help you identify UX issues impacted by these elements and be able to make wise suggestions on how to fix them.
Chapter 6, Considering Accessibility As Part of the UX, focuses on Accessibility and its importance and presents how to consider people with any kind of disability also as part of your target groups. You will learn how to evaluate and analyze apps and websites to find whether they follow the W3C standards for accessibility and how to fix UX issues related to it. You will also see a few cases not only from the digital and online universe but also examples from the physical world and can understand that accessibility is an important topic for not only designers but for everyone who creates products and services for real people in the real world.
Chapter 7, Improving the Physical Experiences, presents that it's also possible to improve the user experience or fix UX issues in any service or environment where we have user interaction, although it is more common to think about websites and mobile apps when we talk about UX. You will find that there are Norman Doors issues everywhere waiting for great design solutions, keeping the user in the center of the project, from ATMs, elevator panel, boarding passes, bus stops, and car panels to public toilets.
Chapter 8, Improving IA for Better Navigation, explains what is IA and how to improve navigability and findability using IA methodologies such as Card sorting, tree testing, taxonomy, and such. You will see how important it is to label and categorize the content in order to help the users find what they need and accomplish their task with no problem, in an easy and intuitive way based on their mental models, besides considering the context and the content. In this chapter, you will find IA tools and deliverables such as task flow, navigation schema, content inventory, navigation flow, flowchart, sitemaps, and content tree.
Chapter 9, Prototyping and Validating UX Solutions, presents the process of testing, validating, and refining UX solutions through wireframes, paper sketches, and different level of prototypes (conceptual, lo-fi, mid-fi, and hi-fi) before delivering the final wireframes and maps to the dev and design teams as a good practice. You will also saw a few options for tools to help you prototype and run tests (online, in person, moderated, and unmoderated), as well as how to run Tree-Testing to validate the IA improvements.
Chapter 10, Implementing UX Solutions, presents a few examples of how to create documentation to a great communication with other teams that are involved in the project and will be responsible for the implementation. You will learn how to create clear and digestible documentation and be able to communicate well with the teams responsible for the UI design and develop/implement the UX fixes.
Chapter 11, Measuring UX Solutions, goes deeper into UX metrics, KPIs, and ROI. You will learn how to verify that all your efforts were made in the right direction; it is important to measure the impact of these changes. By understanding what you are measuring in order to validate the changes you made to fix UX issues, you can demonstrate to the stakeholders the value of investing in UX. Besides deciding which metrics and KPIs really matter for your project, we will also look at different methodologies for qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Appendix, Keeping Up to Date, Working with UX requires you to keep yourselves constantly updated, find and try new tools, discuss with other professionals, and so on. In this appendix, you will find a few links to great references, sources, and discussion groups to help you in this mission.
To get the most out of this book
In order to get the most out of this book, it's preferable that you have some experience developing products or services, besides knowing the basics of UX. It might be good as well if you have some knowledge in using designing tools. Although this book will show you a few great tools to be used, this is not a book focused on tool or software tutorials. Be prepared to use not only online tools, but papers, sticky notes, pens, paper templates, canvas, whiteboards, and drawable walls. Last but not least, be open for a more business approach of getting the best results of fixing bad UX centered on your user.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/FixingbadUXDesigns_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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Understanding UX and its Importance
The challenge that most UX designers and product owners face is ensuring that the UX products and services are user friendly. Some common issues are simplicity, navigation, appearance, and maintenance, and so on. In this book, we will address all these issues using real examples, and examine the main overall problems and solutions regarding accessibility, conversion, content, and the UI, just to name a few issues. You will learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs.
As you progress through the book, you will learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and other similar concepts. You will also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book. By the end of the book, you will be armed with the knowledge to fix bad designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction with your applications.
In this chapter, you will learn the following:
UX
is present everywhere
Bad UX is bad for your business
The ROI of fixing bad UX design
Getting stakeholders involved
Metrics and KPIs
UX is present everywhere
In his book, The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman tells us about his constant trouble with opening doors:
He says, explaining his frustration. This is one of the examples that he presents in his book to illustrate how a poor design can have a negative effect on user experience:
Known as Norman's Doors, we can see examples of these misleading designs everywhere: remote controls, sink taps, buttons, elevator panels, utensils, home appliances, and a number of other examples of how poor design has been causing day-to-day confusion.
We are constantly playing our role as users, having positive or negative experiences, not only when using products, but also offline or brick and mortar services such as navigating in a supermarket, using ATM machines, searching for our gate at the airport, even using toilets can be challenging. And every experience online or offline can be designed or redesigned to be positive. It doesn't matter if it is an app, a website, or a Norman Door.
Just to give an idea of how a poor design can impact different aspects and environments of our day-to-day life, a recent survey by the Japan Restroom Industry Association showed that foreign tourists often have a hard time of understanding the many and different controls of Japanese toilets, making the experience of using the toilet more complicated than they thought: 25% of them confirmed that they did not know how to use a Japanese-style toilet. Alarmingly, I pressed the emergency button was a similarly common, expressed by 8.8% of foreigners. Concerned about being more tourist-friendly for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, Japan's Restroom Industry Association (a group of 10 companies that include Panasonic and Toshiba) has agreed to create a set of standardized pictograms:
As you can see, user experience does not only apply to digital applications, but it can also be seen in simple, everyday activities. It is the main job of a UX designer to turn all these negative experiences, as results of a poor design, into positive experiences.
Bad UX is bad for your business
A badly designed experience can not only be frustrating to the user, but can also highly impact a business, especially when we talk about online businesses. To give you an idea and statistical evidence to demonstrate this statement to your clients or boss, a report by the Baymard Insititute shows that a better design and checkout flow experience could have improved about 35% of ecommerce conversion, in other words, by fixing small UX issues, companies could saved billions of dollars.
It is interesting to closely analyze the study by Baymard (2016) and note that most of the reasons for the abandonment of a business are related somehow to the whole user/client experience:
The study The App Attention Span (2014)—by AppDynamics in partnership with the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London—demonstrates that 90% of users confirmed that they stopped using an app because of poor performance, and 86% of them deleted or uninstalled an app because they found problems with its functionality or design. According to the Customer Experience Report (2010) by RightNow, 82% of customers have left a company because of a bad customer experience.
Other studies show the negative impact of a bad experience: About 40% of users might abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, while 79% will search for another website in order to be able to complete their task.
Going beyond these figures, a bad user experience can impact not only on the customer's relationship with the companies, but also on the employee's performance. In 2013, the Avon Products company reported that it had discontinued a $125 million mobile software development project after running a pilot in Canada, which showed that the iPad version was too hard to use, resulting in many sales reps quitting the company.
The ROI of fixing bad UX design
Fixing a bad design can have an incredibly positive impact on businesses, as reported by Jim Ross, Senior User Experience Architect at D3 Infragistics Services on the study The Business Value of User Experience; it doesn't matter whether the users are employees or customers, a good user experience can help companies not only increase revenue and save money, but also, a bad user experience can seriously impact satisfaction, costs, and sales.
The software development agency On3 agrees with this fact when it points out that companies were able to increase their revenue by 37% thanks to their highly positive user experience:
According to an article by Steve Olenski, published in Forbes, if you design a better user experience, you can boost your user retention. The author reminds us of research by Harvard Business School, which says that it is possible to increase profit by at least 25% by using UX design techniques to satisfy users and boost customer retention. It has a really significant impact on a retention strategy.
This Harvard Business study also shows that a subscription-based business client who ranks the experience as poorest will only have a 43% chance of continuing to be a member a year or so later. On the other hand, members who scored their experiences in the top two tiers would definitely have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year, as you can see in the following chart:
In the same study, researchers found that, among thousands of customers studied, the ones who had the best experiences in the past might spend about 140% more in comparison to those who had the poorest experience previously:
Also in the study Business Value of User Experience (2014), we see that a positive customer experience will increase by over 14% the customers' willingness to pay for what you are offering online by over 14%. It also might reduce their likelihood of their of switching brands by over 15% and increase by over 16% the likelihood of their recommending your products.
The Baymard Institute has reported that a better checkout design can increase the conversion of the average large-sized ecommerce site by over 35%, which means that about $260 billion worth of lost orders in the US and EU could be retain with a better design and checkout-flow experience.
That a positive experience can impact the business was also reported by other companies, studies: the study Customer Experience Impact Report by Oracle (2011), for example, shows that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. American Express has found a similar result in their customer service survey in 2011, which says that 70% of Americans were willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies that they feel provide excellent customer service.
This direction, there is a famous case known as the $300 million button, in which a major ecommerce company has increased their revenue by 45% by just changing a button on their checkout process, as suggested by UX specialist Jared Spool. He helped the company make more than $300 million by making a small UX fix.
In order to find a proper solution, Spool and his team conducted usability tests that showed that the issue was not exactly in the design itself or even not the form of how it was designed, but the representation of it to the users: New customers were feeling suspicious about the registration form and felt that it was a way to add their contact details to the ecommerce email marketing scheme. Also, a great number of the returning customers couldn't remember their login and/or password, and so they either abandoned the cart or created a new account, which made 45% of users create multiple accounts.
The solution found by Spoll was simple: Just replace the Register button with a Continue button, along with a simple message: You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout. With this change, they helped the company generate $15 million-worth of extra purchases in the first month, and $300 million in one year, representing a 45% increase in purchases. It is definitely one of the best illustrative cases that you can use to convince sceptical clients that UX can highly improve conversion. You can be inspired and create variations of the Spool version focused on your user experience:
Getting stakeholders involved
The cost of investing in a great UX should be clear to your company, and, as we saw before, there are many different studies to show it. By not focusing on UX, your company can decrease sales, increase the number of dissatisfied customers, and disengage employees. As we saw before, there are loads of studies to demonstrate the importance of UX and they should be used to not only convince your company about that, but also to get stakeholders involved.
As explained by Smartsheet.com (https://www.smartsheet.com/) in their article What Is Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping and How Do You Do It Effectively?, you should consider all the interested parties in a project as stakeholders, which means not only everyone who might affect and also influence the project itself, but also everyone who might be influenced by it.
In the book, Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience, the author Tom Greever explains the stakeholder needs and the importance of gaining their support. The summary of his book is that, as in any project, designers will need the stakeholder recognition of the value of fixing UX issues and the importance of investing in these tasks. By not having such support, the project might risk losing funding or even never going beyond the prototyping stage.
To ensure that stakeholders are involved can be one of the major success factors in integrating UX practices into services or product development processes and organizations, as pointed out in the paper Stakeholder Involvement: A Success Factor for Achieving Better UX Integration. One example of how important it is to get the stakeholders involved was mentioned by Adaptive Path in the study, Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience: After falling behind their competition online, Bank of America, a design team, in collaboration with a product manager, identified that customers were having a hard time completing the online enrollment process. The design team led a collaborative process that included stakeholders from IT, legal, product, and other departments, and was able to increase the yield by 45%.
It is important to know that the top three reasons projects get derailed are poor communication, lack of clarity, and expectation management amongst stakeholders, as pointed out by NNGroup. However, although it is easy to understand the importance of building stakeholder buy-in, it is something hard to do well, because of lack of knowledge, politics, time, poverty, or even lack of interest. The good news is that there are ways to build strong, mutually supportive relationships with your stakeholders that are tried and tested, before and we will talk about these in this book.
But when exactly should we get them involved? A panel of UX experts, organized by UXmatters, has discussed in one of their editions ways of involving stakeholders at different stages of a project in one of their books. One of the panellists, Dana Chisnell—principal consultant at UsabilityWorks and co-author of Handbook of Usability Testing—pointed out that we should bring in stakeholders as soon as you know who they are.
In an article published on the Xwerx blog, the company's senior UX analyst Murray Nolan reminds us that there's often a misunderstanding at the start of a UX project. In the article, Nolan mentions Xwerx's Head of UX, John Mooney, who reminds us that some stakeholders may believe that they already know what their users want and need, besides having no clue of what UX is and how UX can help their business. Nolan also mentions the author of Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf, statement:
Metrics and KPI's
The interesting thing is that having all the stakeholders' support and collaboration can also accelerate the UX process, and consequently determine the success of the project. To be able to measure it, you will need to define the metrics and KPIs with the stakeholders in order to demonstrate the results, bringing us back to the matter of how we show the ROI of the UX.
The KPI's (key performance indicators), or ways to measure performance, will help you to demonstrate the success of all the UX issues that were fixed or changed. They can be different indicators and come from different sources, such as user research (usability testing, surveys, structured interviews, heuristic evaluations, card sorting, heat maps, A/B tests, and so on) and/or analytics, as soon as task success rate, time on task, page views, clicks, taps, and so on:
You should also consider more business-focused goals and indicators, which means any user touchpoint, such as customer acquisition cost, which is a growth MKT metric; average ticket, which can be impacted by increasing the conversion rate; and also sales data, churn rate, lead generation stats, active users, support calls, basket abandonment, subscribers, returning visitors, and so on:
Besides it being important to define KPI's that you will be able to measure, you should also create a framework to track all these metrics. For example, you can create a framework for defining tasks, users, and metrics, and then measure before and after making changes:
To be able to define these metrics, you will need to understand the company's business goals, direction, and objectives. Having these definitions will help you to align the project objectives to the UX strategy and focus on what you should fix to help the company reach these goals.
It is important to keep in mind that designing an effective user experience requires an understanding of the needs of both the business and users in order to designing a solution that meets them. By understanding the business goals and user needs, it will help you to find exactly what you should fix on the bad UX design (which is what we will see in the following chapters):
Summary
In this chapter, you were introduced to the importance of UX for the success of services and products. You were also shown why UX matters for your product or service, what the ROI, metrics, and KPI's of UX are, and what the importance of getting stakeholders involved is.
Once it is clear to the company and stakeholders as to the importance of applying UX to the services and/or products offered by the company and how it can impact business in and of itself, it is time to further understand what the needs of the stakeholders and users are.
This next phase of the project will help you to better define the MVP of the project, and focus on what really matters to the user and understand how to fix bad UX designs.
In the next few chapters, you will learn how to identify UX issues, explore, validate, implement, and measure UX solutions, as well as learn how to overcome UX challenges, such as increase conversion, improve UI and content, consider accessibility, improve the user experience in public environments, and reorganize IA for better navigation. Enjoy the journey!
Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies
By understanding business and user needs, it will be possible to focus on what exactly should be fixed. It is important to have a clear idea of what the problems are that your UX efforts aim to solve and understand what the solutions are that the company provides.
Keep in mind that anything that is preventing your users from accomplishing the task on your site, app, service, or product will result in a poor experience and will make it difficult for your business to deliver the solutions to your customer.
As we saw in Chapter 1, Understanding UX and Its Importance, a bad user experience can result in serious problems for your business. In this chapter, you will learn how to identify UX issues and understand the project challenges by:
Identifying who are your stakeholders and their needs
Identifying who are your users are, and their needs
Doing competitive comparative analysis
Understanding the user journey and finding touchpoints
Defining what are the problems and the project goals/challenges
Using UX researching/discovering methodologies
