User experience, or UX for short, is a buzzword that has continued to dominate the business world over the years. According to research, there is a reason for it. In fact, almost 80% of web users today are willing to avail of products and services if there is a great UX. This allows any business to stand out from the crowd. Remember this, too – while services are easy to imitate, a great user experience is not.
In this blog post, we will explore UX experience on a deeper level, including how to get started with a working and effective UX design process, how to conduct UX research, and more.
What is User Experience?
Do you ever wonder how utilizing certain products makes you feel? What emotions are you feeling when you are using these products? Are you glad or not satisfied at all? The emotions and feelings building up and evoking can denote UX.
But UX is really about understanding how online users feel when interacting with your construction website and products – Is your website quick to load, and can your clients find what they need? Does the web visitor enjoy exploring your construction website, and most importantly, will the overall experience make them more or less likely to purchase your services and products?
If you reach this part of the blog, we assume you already understand what UX means. It is time now to go to the next part. Read further.
UX Design Process: What You Must Include and How to Do It Right?
What does it take to create a great user experience? The main key lies in the UX design process, and this process is instrumental in developing solutions that ultimately resonate with its users. Let us take a look at some elements of the UX design process, including its benefits.
- User Research: The starting point of a user-centered design is user research. To create a user-centered experience, you need to have a deeper understanding of your target audience’s goals, pain points, and challenges. You can best achieve this by conducting surveys, session recordings, and user interviews.
- Information Architecture (IA): This element is another important aspect of the user experience. Its main role is to sort information in a way that makes it intuitive and helpful for web users to navigate. One of the few ways you can verify IA is by testing the intended design with users, which can bring you to…
- Visual Design: This term is used to define the feel and look of a project. The visual design includes elements like your construction website’s layout, symbols, and colors that help web users interact with the user interface.
- Usability: This aspect defines the degree to which the target audience can use a service or a product. Know that there are five basic constituents to usability – the product’s efficiency, learnability, memorability, errors, as well as the levels of user satisfaction.
So, there it is the four main elements of the design process. And another important thing to ask is what you can benefit from following the process. Here we cite some of the most significant ones:
- Instant boost in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs): User experience is one of the most vital principles of web design. If you focus on UX, expect your website’s SERP ranking to improve.
- Higher conversion rate: If you consistently make sure that your web visitors can easily find the details they are looking for, you tend to increase the chances of boosting your conversions.
- User retention improvement: When your product or services offer a rewarding experience, the users will most likely return to it.
- A stronger construction brand: A great user experience is memorable to web visitors. This only means that by ensuring a flawless UX, you can strengthen the construction of your brand image and increase the likelihood of getting positive reviews online.
Tips on Conducting Effective UX Research Like a Pro
Here are some of the most valuable tips that can help you in conducting UX research:
1. User Groups
This technique, also called focus groups, are structured interview that smoothly reveals your target audience’s experiences, attitudes, and desires. This is a very practical and helpful UX research method, especially when your company needs many insights quickly.
Conducting user groups can help your construction company better understand:
- How do online users perceive your products and services?
- What problems do online users experience with your products
- What users believe in your product’s most important features?
- Where do users feel the product fails to meet their expectations?
- What do the users believe in the most important features of your services and products?
2. Usability Testing
This method evaluates a service and product by testing it with representative users. The main goal of this particular UX research method is to determine usability problems and identify users’ overall satisfaction with the product or service. Here are some best practices for usability testing:
- Test with five users: Getting started with five is enough to determine the design’s most critical usability problems.
- Invite your team during testing sessions: Anybody involved with how quickly and well issues are addressed must be invited during the testing sessions. Your company’s stakeholders, who can be the executive team and lead web designers, should be part of the testing session.
- Keep the findings concise and on-point: Whenever you report the findings of the usability testing, make sure to limit the comments to the very important ones. We suggest including the top three problems and the top three positive comments.
3. User Interviews
An interview is no short when it comes to popularity. This well-known user experience methodology has been used over the years. Interviews are conducted to discover the beliefs, attitudes, and experiences of users and potential service users. This method is usually conducted by one interviewer speaking to one user for at least 30 minutes to an hour. It is up to you how you can do an interview – face to face, via video stream, or over the phone.
Here are some of the best practices of this method:
- Hire a skilled interview: If you do not want to interview by yourself, you can hire a professional interviewer. A skilled interviewer asks unbiasedly, is very well put together, makes users feel at ease, and knows how and when to probe for more details.
- Create a discussion guide: Write and prepare a discussion guide and an interview protocol. This guide must include all questions and follow-up questions.
- Get informed consent: Before starting the interview, obtain consent and permission to record the session. It is also great to have one or two note-takers by hand.
4. Online Surveys
Another widely used research tool is a survey. Surveys include a set of questions used to determine the attitudes, preferences, and opinions of your users on a certain topic. Nowadays, surveys are typically conducted online, in different formats and lengths. Data collected from surveys are received instantly, and the data will provide you with some level of analysis.
Below are some best practices for conducting online surveys:
- Keep it simple: Make sure the questions can easily be understood. Avoid complex words since they can make questions hard to comprehend, which may bring the data into question.
- Keep it short: Keep online surveys concise. Focus only on what is truly important.
- Keep it engaging: Ensure to include a mix of both open-ended questions and multiple-choice questions.
5. User Personas
User personas are made-up and fictional representations of your target customers. The persona is typically based on user research and includes your target audience’s goals, needs, and behavior patterns.
Here are the best practices for a user persona:
- Create well-defined user personas: A good user persona contains four main pieces of information – demographic profile, header, end goals, and scenario.
- Keep personas brief: Avoid adding more details that are not useful in influencing the designs. If it does not affect the final designs or help make decisions easier, then omit it.
- Make personas realistic and specific: Make sure to avoid any form of exaggeration. Include only the details that can help you find real-life representations for your user personas.
How Is Your User Experience?
Offering a great UX is no longer an option. It is an expectation that a lot of people expect. However, creating a great UX requires a deeper knowledge of your target audience, which calls for in-depth UX research to form the foundation of an effective UX design process. Having everything put together can increase your chances of creating products and services that meet your client’s goals and boost your ROI.
So, whenever you create your user experience design process, always remember to keep readability, simplicity, and accessibility in mind and ensure that your user flow is consistent.
And if you want to take your UX to the next level, partner with a full-service digital marketing agency. Here at ConstructionMarketing.io, we can take your UX to grander heights for greater customer satisfaction, better Google search results, and higher conversions.
Talk to us today. We will help you create a great user experience for your target audience.