Design

How UX Design is Shaping Sales and Profit

It’s 2017 and it takes nothing more than one moderately bad experience before a customer decides to close a tab on any website, leave an online store, unfollow a media outlet on social media, and never look back. Since shopping predominantly either begins or is completed online, a first impression is often the only chance a brand gets to attract customers. As if that weren’t difficult enough in today’s competitive market, getting them to them stay on a website or inside an app longer is yet another level up.

And this is why UX design has been the talk of the town lately, for both online businesses and traditional brands. The fact that the vast majority of people use mobile devices to look for and purchase products and services have made all the difference for UX design. Sluggish, lagging apps, unsuccessful or complicated mobile transactions, time-wasting and overly complicated features, as well as one-sided communication with customers, must become a thing of the past for any business that aims to survive. With AI, VR and AR technologies rapidly taking over, the world of UX design is already being transformed in ways that will forever change the consumer experience.

Omnipresent and time saving UX

With all of the various devices being used to look for information online, device-based discrimination in terms of design has become clearly outdated. Responsive design has now become the standard, but many brands and businesses are failing to catch up with the times as fast as they should be. Websites with features that aren’t seamlessly optimized for both mobile and desktop devices are the perfect recipe for losing customers.

The ability for users to access a website immediately and get crucial information from any of their devices is paramount, especially when people are on the go. No one is willing to spare the time to deal with complicated website navigation, slow loading, or otherwise dysfunctional design – because most users today know they don’t have to put up with any of that. UX design has become an integral part of customer care. Those following the design industry closely are predicting that grid design, high-quality images, AI-powered chat bots, and natural language interfaces are the wave of the near future in design, proving that it’s no longer just pretty visuals that clients are looking for but satisfaction of at least four of the five human senses.

Conversations without borders – or screens

The fast development and progress of AI in the last few years has enabled all sorts of chatbots and voice activated technology to thrive. There is almost nothing that chatbots can’t do – from ordering food and performing searches to providing companionship throughout a sleepless night. Inexpensive to develop, the main thing to keep in mind about these chat applications is the actual chatting and the user experience they provide.

UX designers often focus on the conversation flow that is as seamless as possible, almost as if there is a person answering from the other end, even though users are fully aware that there isn’t. Some of the best chatbots, such as Cortana and Alexa, are already paving the way to future with more advanced technology of this type.

Where there’s AI, there are VR and AR as well. If we imagine virtual reality as a place, then we can say this is the place where anything is possible. Here UX designers have all the freedom in the world to create, develop, and customize their designs, making them useful and valuable for end users. Imagine taking a demo tour of your next vacation location and being able to interact with objects in it before deciding to book it. That’s all possible now. It means more learning for UX designers and a confoundingly growing selection of design schools and courses to choose from, but also more opportunity for development of user experience overall.

Storytelling with a twist

Humans are inherently visual beings, a well-established fact that many tend to forget. Those who don’t end up creating visually appealing, successful designs that actually work.

A good user experience should tell a story and that story should engage the user. This formula seems simple but some UX designers – or their clients – seem to have issues in completely grasping this concept. The key to creating a good UX is making the user the center of the story. Catering to their personal needs is more important than ever, so personalization and customization are the waves of the future.

Mixing visual aspects with storytelling while engaging the user to interact with the design has proven to garner attention and, more importantly, keep it. Good UX in today’s day and age also means knowing consumer behavior and recognizing which stimuli work and which don’t. In the end, it all comes down to knowing your target audience and offering them what they want and what they know is possible in the form of a useful, efficient design and content.

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