Technology and people are continuously evolving and there is a need for addressing their changing needs and demands. User Experience, or UX, is that part of a designer's responsibility to address these changing trends in designing the internet and the way we interact with it on a daily basis. Products are developed with an intention to make a piece of work easily achievable for the end user. But these end-user products also have to address the way they are designed to function. A great interface is the one which makes your user comfortable while using it and also makes the entire task joyful. The job of the User Experience designer is to make the user browse through the entire product and be engaged with the product. A million users with no activity on the product don't make any sense.
While the growth hacker projects the product's growth through quantitative analysis, the User experience designer will have to come up with intuitive design related issues that are causing the user drop offs. A/B testing is the one among many things the UX designer tests the product for any kind of drawback in the design sense. To let you further understand about what exactly a User Experience designer does, consider the example of designing a door handle. The main objective is to design a door that would let a user open when needed. But the UX designer needs to build one the users would be encouraged to open. Making the users compelled to engage with the product to provide a unique and fun experience is what design hacks are all about.
These design hacks have managed to increase user subscriptions, reduce bounce rate, increase user activity and in turn increase the product's revenues. Below are the top 10 design hacks which you can apply to improve the User Experience of your product.
User research and Paper prototyping
To get started on design hacking your product, you will need to take on sufficient user research and data analysis. Undergo competitive analysis to understand the market and how your product will seemingly fit into it. Once the research part is done, make use of powerful prototyping tools like InVision, Axure RP, Origami and more, you can find more at Design Weekly. Get together with your team to brainstorm and sketch the initial prototypes of the product. Paper prototyping could yield you a quick and rough idea of the way the product will come to shape.
The paper prototyping enhances your designing skills and idea iterations while not being too reliant on the design prototyping tools.
Automate processes wherever possible
Provide your users with smart defaults while accessing fill-up forms and such. This design hack makes it easy for the user to not go through the pain of typing out every single letter in the blocks of information needed from them. A website had reported of an increase in over 38% in conversions once they automated a part of the signup for their e-commerce website. You can automate the sign up blocks like Country and State, based on the user's entered Pin code number.
Speeding up a customer's decision making process is achieved by automating parts of your product that are slowing your users down.
Alignment and Attention Hack
Alignment of your product description page makes a lot of difference when it comes to ease of use for the customer. The one column pattern seen above makes the entire product description as a narrative and the chances of diverting through other information slim down. Provide them with multi-column layouts and chances are high that they may get distracted by the other information that you simultaneously throw at them.
The Attention hack is about merging similar tasks and grouping navigational elements by their popularity. The attention span of users is falling rapidly and this design hack would make them quickly get to their page of choice without having to skim through the entire website or application.
Recommend your own best products/services
When you provide your users with more options to choose from, the more confused they will become. Out of the choices you provide them, make sure you always highlight your own recommended product or service to make things simpler for them. Think as a customer in this regards and choose the product/service that you would actively recommend to a new user.
The more number of chances reduce the likeliness of getting converted and a decision being made. So, either work down your choices or emphasize your best package by highlighting it as a recommended product.
The Colour Hack
Icons and images make the understanding of a link even better and since universal icons are rare, you can define your own set of icons and use them as and when needed. Images convey message faster than words do and also icons do not need to be translated like their text counterparts do. Everyone understands the language of images and icons would shorten that communication barrier significantly.
Colours and font sizes should be followed as per your design guidelines and the best visual hierarchy communicates an uncluttered and concise message. Make use of a single colour scheme and font family throughout the product or service. Make use of shades of black that are a bit greyish, instead of a plain black. Use a font family with a lot of weights available and use them accordingly. If not possible, make use of two font families, one for the headers and the other for the remaining piece of information. Apart from that, don't overdo on colours or typography and maintain sufficient whitespace.
Try Transition and Material design
Material design is a recently announced designing language, developed by Google. Transitions that blend borders and make the entire browsing experience a wonderful one is what the Material design is all about. The stylish flat design and beautifully smooth transitions are now the new trend for UX designers. You can use the user flows to get a better understanding of the transitions and design them in a way that they are smooth and feel less obtrusive.
You can also read more about the best examples of Google's Material design apps.
Create design that loads fast
Value your user's time and make design that is easy, both on the eyes of your users and the servers. Don't go for stylish animations that would take up a major portion of your users' time. With each second passing by, the drop off rate of your users increases three-folds. You can either make use of clean code and lighter images or use loading bars to show the progress of the loading bar for an estimate of the loading time.
Also Cache collected data in user forms to make the registration and checkout process even faster and effective.
Create and follow Style guidelines
Style guides are a set of documentations that define important aspects of design like fonts, typography, line spacing, colour combinations and more. This style guideline allows systematic approach to design and makes the designing rules for a product understandable for your peer designers.
The site's basic information like general typography, grids, colours, buttons and patterns are all defined by this style guide. Create one for your product and refer to it while in any dilemma.
Provide Gestures and Responsiveness
Pinch zoom, rotate, kinect and more are all the latest gestures in wide use and you must make sure your product/service provides them the comfort of gesture based accessing instead of just buttons and text links. Make your app or service completely responsive; meaning the same iteration of the product must fit devices of all shapes and sizes.
These gesture-based interactions and responsive design bring an intuitive and uncluttered feel to your products.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
Once your well-developed product is done with all the phases of designing and is live, it shouldn't be left dormant after that. Continuously monitor your product for later customer analysis and be quick to act on any signs of fading of user activity on your product. Use heat mapping services to keep track of what compels your users to click or walk away from your services. Design trends vary within a span of every few users and you should always be prepared to jump on the trend bandwagon early on.
Make use of effective user feedbacks and with the help of A/B testing, chalk out a new direction for your product's design and act on it timely.
What are the design hacks you would recommend to your fellow UX Designers? Share your thoughts and comments on design hacks below.