There is nothing more tragic than a company with a great product that is hampered by poor user experience. To many companies, user experience is pushed to the end of the development cycle and done at the last minute. This neglect has resulted in the majority of companies dealing with poor user experience.
What exactly is user experience?
User experience refers to the entire interaction between your product and the customer. Taking an application for example, this would include the second the user clicks the application right up until the user closes your application. This includes absolutely the entire interaction. From load times to design, everything must be considered when developing the best user experience possible.
The biggest mistake today in Silicon Valley is that aesthetic design has become priority one. Many startups are able to use various web and mobile app design tools that makes generating a web page or mobile app quick and easy. While the design is typically clean, user experience is often horrible with these tools. Pages can load slowly, pictures can be far too large or too small, and the interface can be just plain unintuitive. I have been able to find multiple user experience design mistakes in the first 5 minutes for nearly any product or company I have partnered with. In fact, user experience has become so neglected that I automatically assume that user experience design work must be done for all of my clients.
Take a look at the UI design we built for PACE Funding here.
The immediate attention span for the general population is 3-5 seconds
This is a realization that every startup must understand. If your app or website begins running into loading problems right off the bat, you will lose a significant portion of your customers. In this day and age, there is no excuse for a website to not load close to immediately on most internet connections. If your company does not want to spend much time on user experience development, the bare minimum should be getting your load times down.
Design for the right audience from the beginning
The primary piece of advice that I give startups and larger companies is that the audience should be very clear right from the start. The way a teenager interacts with a user interface is very different than the way a mom or grandma would interact with a UI. There is also a clear difference between those who are passionate about computers or those who use their phone as primarily a Facebook machine. These factors must be taken into account, and the user experience must be designed around them. If you begin product development prior to establishing a clear audience, the result would be the very painful task of redesigning entire portions of your product. Do it right from the start.
At the end of the day, this all ties into our philosophy here at Brown Deck Innovations. Setting everything up and understanding what we’re doing and why we’re doing it before a single line of code is written is integral to our work. We continuously analyze everything including user experience to ensure that we get it right the first time.
If user experience development or any other software challenges is holding your company back, let’s meet and explore possibilities of partnering.