Your digital product might possibly be the most complicated piece of software developed today. That’s why it’s vital you’re implementing user experience (UX) best practices that support the product and user’s objectives, and make that painstaking effort worthwhile.
In this blog, we outline our best practices for guiding your product’s UX as well as considerations for diagnosing and addressing low conversion rates.
UX best practices and design principles
M.A.P. (message, audience, purpose)
Determine your content’s message, audience, and purpose. Make a list of what you want your target user to learn, understand, or accomplish. Are you onboarding admins to a new product that they must configure and roll out? Introducing a new feature to existing customers? Your answers will assist you in starting to build the user experience.
User first, data-driven
All decisions are to be made with the user’s needs in mind and should be shaped by data. This will provide evidence to support decision-making or resource prioritisation, with the goal of gathering additional information for insight and assessment.
Small steps, towards ambitious goals
The development of online capabilities should be accomplished gradually through well-defined projects with specified, measurable goals. This will allow you to measure the impact of each “step” and make a case for additional investment and innovation.
Prioritise content, not format
Your product’s value is in the content, not the delivery. The objective is to ensure that users find relevant content and then choose whichever format they like; this choice should not limit content selection.
Continually evolve
To maintain the success of your product, it’s vital to constantly evaluate efficacy and performance. It’s best practice to identify key performance indicators to observe user activity and allow you to analyse product performance so the necessary changes can be made.
Address needs at all stages of the user journey
Assist in optimising user experience and efficiency by designing for the intended persona(s). Is it novices, advanced users, or somewhere in the middle? What do you want users to think or feel? What exactly do you want them to do? New users require an onboarding process that goes beyond the first five minutes of logging in. Existing users require new feature flows. Inactive consumers require flows that familiarise them with the product.
Storyboard
Consider a user’s first encounter with your product. What is the most immediately useful information you can provide? On the second or third? Is your feature something the user can do or is it more informative?
Help, don’t disrupt
Is each in-app alert both informative and timely? Is it required? Check with others to ensure you’re not developing rival or concurrent material to avoid confusion.
Ensure its local
Provide as much assistance, suggestions, guidance and answers as possible in the UI itself, where users have the greatest context.
Keep it relevant
Adapt material to suit the user, the organisation and other user-specific aspects. Use data (previous usage statistics, click pathways, search phrases, engagement metrics) and user research to anticipate users’ demands.
Importance of the user interface
User interface (UI) is vital when meeting user expectations and supports the effective functionality of your digital platform. A well-designed user interface creates a clear and easy-to-understand relationship between the user and app or website through art working, elegant design, and responsiveness.
When creating a UI design which reflects and champions your brand’s personality, it’s vital to put the user’s wants and needs first in terms of accessibility and ease of use. A mix of well-designed animations, visualisations, typography, and colour will help bolster your product’s conversion rates, as it will keep the user visually delighted and engaged.
Considerations for increasing engagement
Streamline the signup process
Registration is typically the first point of contact a user has with a digital product and as always, first impressions always matter. When it comes to the signup procedure, simply request the most important information upfront. A potential customer’s email address is often enough to get them into the application.
Clarify with onboarding
Customer churn is an important key performance indicator for digital products. User confusion might result from poor onboarding. When people are stumped, they cancel their memberships. A positive onboarding experience engages users, creates a favourable first impression and teaches them how to execute specific activities.
Simplify information architecture
Users find what they need from an application largely through information architecture and navigation. As such, they should be clear and straightforward. It’s essential that systems present information in an expanded state within the first few stages. This lets new users become aware of the various capabilities before reducing to free up space for vital tasks.
Consider using mega menus for large, complex tasks. Mega menus offer the advantage of revealing additional and even tertiary navigation features with a single touch, increasing discoverability for new users. Intuitive labelling and navigation arrangement are still required (mega menus don’t assist the experience on mobile devices), but they can be beneficial to job speed on the desktop.
Use dashboards to engage and inform
Because a dashboard is typically the first thing a user sees when coming into contact with a digital product, focusing on dashboard user experience will nearly always result in a higher ROI. A good dashboard experience answers the following questions for users:
- What is my current status or how am I doing?
- What recent activity has occurred?
- What issues should I be concerned about?
- What are the items on my “To Do” list?
- How can I begin critical work quickly?
A visual history of activity assists users in understanding what happened while they were away from the platform. This list or graphic should include actionable items so that the user may follow up on anything significant. Users of sophisticated applications can benefit greatly from lists of alerts ordered by priority. To ensure that vital items are viewed, they can be sorted out as actionable and dismissible alerts.
Ensure that “help” is useful and always available
In the event that users get stuck, successful digital products offer user-friendly assistance and support mechanisms. Modern users expect to be able to acquire answers to their questions without having to spend time on the phone. There are a few key approaches to accomplish this.
First and foremost, the support system should be easily available from any location inside the application. If a person determines they need assistance, it is likely that they are already frustrated. Forcing them to dig for help content is a recipe for making the experience worse.
FAQs help users quickly locate answers to frequently asked questions, but they can also be enhanced. It is also crucial to provide live online help for those who prefer that channel over traditional support methods (this is especially important for younger audiences). While these user-facing assistance systems are necessary, what happens behind the scenes is equally significant. Following up on user complaints, identifying defects, filing cases, and continuously enhancing the customer experience are all critical components of SaaS durability.
Conclusion
A successful digital product requires extensive work and continual commitment to review and iterate, but it’s a struggle well worth winning to keep satisfied customers. It’s all about making the correct actions in the right order at the right time when it comes to digital product engagement. Identifying the reasons and raising conversion rates necessitates these measures no matter how large or frequent.
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