A Simple and Effective User Experience Design Process for Your Digital Products

In his book named ‘Hooked,’ Nir Eyal stated that 79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up.

It delves deep into the psychology underpinning habits and how some successful companies make use of this tactic to build their digital product that keeps their customers hooked to it for a longer period of time.

It’s a well-accepted fact that successful digital products manage to hook the users and do better business as compared to others. A great product associates people’s emotions and routine into its design that makes them come back to that product after some time.

What makes these products really great is a simple and effective user experience (UX). According to Forrester’s research, a frictionless UX design can help to increase user conversion rates up to 400%.

A digital product with good user experience is functional, simple to use, visually appealing, and allows the user to complete their tasks quickly without any hassles.

After acknowledging the importance of a product with good user experience, Let’s now look at how companies can build such digital products.

6 Steps to build a simple and effective UX for your digital product

Elicit & Validate Requirements

The first step to building a successful digital product is requirement gathering. Companies must first define the product’s scope, demonstrate how it will impact the customers and its overall business, and also determine the budget and resources required to build the product.

Once the company determines the requirement, it can seek approval from the management and other important stakeholders to begin designing the digital product. Requirement gathering is important as it will serve as a roadmap for UX designers to build a product with a good UX.

Conduct User Research

What does the user want? Well, no one can answer that better than the user itself. Hence, a company should start its UX design process by conducting user research.

Companies can do group interviews or 1:1 interview with target users to understand their pain points, challenges, and expectations from the product. They can also do customer surveys to save time and reach a broader segment. This data will provide the company with rich insights into what the user expects, their goals, and needs. It will help the UX designers to determine how to enhance the user’s experience.

In this stage, designers must avoid making any kind of assumptions as that could lead to misinterpretations and a product with bad user experience. User data will help the designers to build the workflows from one step to another and make the experience seamless.

Design the Wireframe

Once the designer knows what the user wants, it’s time to build a wireframe. A wireframe is a low-fidelity design layout that provides the layout and structure of the page. Developers and designers use it as a blueprint to build the interface and the overall experience.

The usability and efficiency of the final product depends on the wireframe. It helps the designers and developers to create a flow that allows users to take an intended action. For example, if the intended action is to make a user buy a product, the flow would be designed in a way that users can easily add a product to the cart, make the payment in a single click, and complete the checkout procedure.

Designers and developers must use wireframes to connect the product’s visual design with its information architecture. This will help them prepare for the next step, prototyping.

Build a Prototype

A prototype visually represents how the actual digital product would look once it’s ready. It is a stage where the UX designer has an opportunity to experiment with new ideas, functionalities, and usability before the actual product is designed.

This is also the stage where all the product stakeholders are invited to validate the prototype and check if it matches the user requirements. Once the designers receive the feedback, they refine the prototype and continue doing it till it meets the requirements.

Prototyping is extremely crucial as it can be done at minimal costs. It can also be used to demonstrate the value of the final product to the management, stakeholders, and clients. This will help us understand the design better.

Perform Testing

Once the prototype is finalized, and the actual product is designed, it’s time for testing. Testing is crucial because research has found that it helps to unveil at least 85% of usability issues. It will help in building a product that the user actually prefers.

The testers perform various types of testing such as usability testing, performance testing, security, and A/B testing to check if the product surpasses the set benchmarks. They send their observations to the designers and developers for fixing.

Testing is not a one-time step. It is an iterative process that helps companies launch a product that meets users’ expectations and enhances the user experience.

Implement Changes and Launch

Once the bugs and other issues are fixed, it’s time to launch the digital product to a wider market. Launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with minimum but essential features is always better as that will address the user’s main pain points and save time and costs on designing the product.

In this stage, gather feedback and observe what the users say about the digital product. Ensure that it provides them with a seamless experience and enables them to take the intended action easily.

Conclusion

The UX designing process never ends with the product launch. User expectations keep changing. Companies have to understand the users’ needs and guide the designers and developers to innovate the product to meet expectations.

The benefit of a digital product is that improvements and innovations can be made continuously without interrupting the user’s experience.

To create that experience in an agile way, companies must work with experts who understand UX designs and specialize in building user-friendly digital products as it is much more than just visual designs.

At Pragmatyc, we provide end-to-end expertise – from product consultation to modernization to help companies build successful digital products.

Let’s collaborate!