Imagine investing in a new website that looks really good and matches your brand’s aesthetic. Sounds perfect, right? With a website like this, you’d expect your brand to grow and generate more revenue.
A huge British retail company, Marks and Spencer, had the same goal when they invested nearly $195 million in a new website. However, they didn’t achieve this goal. Instead, they were met with complaining customers.
Why? Because for this new website they had to create accounts on the website where they couldn’t even reset the password. The tablet version was complex, and the website was crashing. This eventually caused them a loss of $71 million.
This is what happens when you don’t focus on user experience management. Prioritizing your user’s needs is essential for a good UX. So, explore our blog with us and discover why UX management is so important!
What is user experience management?
How did you feel the last time you interacted with a new digital product or app? If you didn’t understand how to navigate either, you would have felt confused. On the other hand, an easy-to-understand app or product would make you happy.
This is an experience where you interact with a product or service. You then respond in a certain way. All of this is overlooked by user experience management. It’s a vital aspect of design and complements business strategies.
Good UX management focuses on creating user-friendly designs. It also takes care of other elements like:
- Conducting proper user research and creating personas and demographics.
- Optimizing the user journey to deliver better navigation and user satisfaction.
- Testing with users to ensure the UX matches with user expectations with usability testing.
- Combining psychological and technical characteristics to design better user experiences.
The main focus of a good UX management strategy is to create experiences that resonate with users.
What is the importance of user experience management?
Without proper user experience management, you could end up like Marks and Spencer. Your business could face heavy losses and reputation damage. 88% of users don’t return to sites with a bad UX.
This is why UX management is so vital for a business. It deals with a user’s needs and preferences through detailed user research. By analyzing user behaviors, web app designers and managers create user personas. Creating these personas helps with optimizing the user journey and conducting usability testing.
You deliver user satisfaction only after creating a powerful user management strategy. It creates a bond between a business and its clients.
What are the Key Components of UX Management?
Lots of things contribute to the user experience. Whether it’s bad or good, these key components are vital in every strategy:
1. User Research
When you design a product, your primary focus should be on your users. After all, you wouldn’t work on a user-friendly design for months to keep it to yourself.
User research involves understanding your user’s needs and behaviors. This helps in optimizing the user journey. It’s about analyzing their preferences and expectations. UX management allows you to create an ideal app or product.
2. Information Architecture
Information architecture helps logically organize the content. You’ve probably visited some websites that were so confusing that you just left. These sites often lack information architecture.
The aim is to structure and label the content following a good hierarchy. By doing this, you automatically get a site where it’s easy to find whatever you need. A good information architecture is all about delivering a good user experience.
3. Visual Design
The obvious layout of a page can make or break a company’s online reputation. A confusing layout means frustrating reactions. At the same time, a simple layout equals happy customers.
Visual design handles the layout and design of an app or page. Web app designers balance out colors and typography to ensure the visual design doesn’t feel overwhelming. A good visual design gets good usability testing results and provokes positive emotions.
4. Usability
Ensuring easy usability automatically results in accessibility. Why prioritize accessibility? Because your product should be diverse.
Anyone, regardless of their abilities, should be able to access your products. This positions you as a thoughtful brand. When you design with empathy in mind, you’re able to deliver good usability. You can learn what to improve through usability testing.
5. Performance Optimization
Ever visited a site that looked amazing but was slow and didn’t load? You probably admired that site for its looks, but the amazement faded away from your eyes as the website got slower.
Performance Optimization deals with this. It helps you ensure that everything is working smoothly. If a page looks good, it should load quickly, too. It takes a user three seconds to leave when a page doesn’t load.
6. User Feedback
User feedback works the same way as a charger for a phone. If you’re aiming to provide a good UX, user feedback can be more valuable than you think.
Just imagine getting firsthand insights from the audience that you’re making the product for. It’s a lot like the classic, “Hey, does this grey shirt look good on me?” You ask someone, and their feedback broadens your view on what you can do to improve!
7. Improvement
Feedback often highlights issues that the UX managers do not see. It’s natural since they may become too familiar with their designs and processes.
You can get a user-friendly design by gathering user responses and improving according to them. When sites are user and mobile-friendly, 74% of people are more likely to return. This is because these apps and products connect with these users.
What are the types of UX Management?
User experience management looks at the various phases of the user journey. It helps designers work on the basis of proof instead of complete guesswork. If you’re only guessing what a product may do, how can you be sure you’re designing it correctly?
These types of UX management help you focus on the right needs. Each of these helps create a distinct strategy. Let’s see what these are:
Strategic UX Management
If you’re worried about aligning the user experience with your brand, Strategic UX management is for you. It manages a brand’s reputation through its products. It also works on:
- High-level planning that helps visualize and understand how to manage things.
- Understanding the market competition and aligning it with user needs.
- It helps set a vision for the brand and creates a powerful goal.
Strategic UX management is all about businesses and their clients. It positions your product’s needs with your company’s long-term goals. This improves customer satisfaction and brand growth.
Tactical UX Management
Tactical UX management comes in when you’re working on the user experience of a certain project. It helps focus on initiatives. It also helps in:
- Planning and performing activities that help meet a small goal.
- Enhancing or adding a new feature in an existing project without impacting the current user experience.
- Focusing on user feedback and iterations to ensure the improvements are on point.
Tactical UX management aims to make a project’s user experience pleasing. It looks at various aspects and does not focus on aligning things with a company’s goals. At least not as much as in strategic UX management.
Operational UX Management
Once you launch your product, you’re not done. You still have to manage the user experience of a project, website, or application. This is where Operational UX Management comes in:
- It helps deal with the daily implementation of UX practices. This can include blogs and social media posts.
- It focuses on creating consistency to deliver a high-quality UX.
- It maintains a smooth user experience across all devices, enhancing user engagement.
This type of user experience management helps maintain a brand’s online representation. In a digital world, several people visit a business online before visiting it real life. A good user experience can get you more customers!
Case Study: How can UX management help?
To help you understand more details, we’re presenting an impacting case study. It will help you understand the influence a good UX can have on a brand.
Airbnb
Airbnb is often the platform that comes to mind when you’re planning to travel and need a place to stay. It quickly gained popularity due to its lodging services and seamless website navigation.
But then, why did it need to improve its UX? The team noticed that 1.5 million photos were being sent to and fro each week. Majority of these were related to explaining the location and entry details.
Because of this, Airbnb decided to launch a new feature. This was on the basis of organic feedback. This new feature allows hosts to create visual check-ins. It even translates things for foreigners. This new feature significantly improved their user experience and raised conversions.
Yet, the team did not stop there. To further improve the user experience management, they kept an eye on the feature. This helped them improve the design and make improvements later too!
What are the challenges in user experience management?
User experience management sounds like a detailed process. It is. But that doesn’t mean that it’ll always come out perfect. Like everything in the software industry, UX management comes with its own challenges. To deliver a powerful user experience management strategy, you have to avoid the following things:
1. Issues with user research
User research involves gathering a few users. They help you determine what a user’s expectations are and what you may need to improve.
The issue here is that it’s not easy to gather the right users for research. Individuals have to tick several boxes to qualify. Looking for the right users can be time-consuming.
2. Deadlines and tight budgets
Many times, managers and designers are faced with such problems. A restricted budget has often killed the creativity of many.
There are times when you wish that you could buy more deadline time. However, it isn’t possible. This haste often leads to missed opportunities to enhance the UX.
3. Struggling with development needs
Designers and developers are equally important in any project. However, their needs and expectations can sometimes be very distinct. This may create issues.
Designers care about a user’s response and their perspective. Developers look at things from a technical point of view. This is why both still need each other.
4. Focusing on too many problems
User experience managers care about their users and their concerns. Due to this, they’re actively willing to fix any problems that arise.
But this passion to fix one problem can highlight others. Although this isn’t bad, it’s still time-consuming. The time and budget are limited so it’s vital to balance things out.
5. Underestimating UX design
User experience starts with identifying a user’s needs. It always finishes with building a product that satisfies these requirements. Design plays a big role here.
UX design is a completely different branch. It follows its own separate principles to deliver the perfect user experience. This design heavily impacts the conversions.
6. Collaboration problems
Sometimes, there’s just one person on your team with whom you don’t get along. This is often because when you work on the same project, your values are distinct.
To understand one side’s needs, we often have to compromise our own and vice versa. Creating an environment where collaboration is actually fun can be a challenge.
Wrapping things up
User experience management is a diverse field. It overlooks several aspects in order to deliver a good user experience. When your brand offers a good UX, you’ll naturally get higher conversions that will help generate more revenue. At Linkitsoft, we know the importance of UX management. This is why we follow each principle to ensure that our UX designs do the best.
If you’re planning to invest in the user experience, then you’re not alone. Around 70% of companies view UX and customer experience (CX) as strong aspects that distinguish them from their competitors. Your company should be one of them too.
Why choose us?
Through our years of experience and prominence in the software industry, we’ve learned a lot about what matters. To deliver a good user experience, we:
- Focus on the app development process, creating apps that don’t crash and work smoothly.
- Create engaging UX designs that are bound to increase conversions.
- Maintain consistency across all devices so your brand is able to deliver a good user experience.
Get in touch with us today. Get an intellectual company to partner with you and deliver the best user experience possible. One that keeps clients coming!
