What scalability are most easily overlooked by startup teams that are limited by manpower and priorities? design? Development logic? Perhaps user experience is also an important part of determining the success or failure of a product.
This article from
reveals to us some of the most common user experience mistakes that startup teams make.
How can I improve the user experience of my website (or app)? This is a common question with no standard answer. Especially for start-up teams and products, the influencing factors involved in this problem are even more diverse.
Fortunately, there are some practical guidelines that can help move us in the right direction. In this article we’ll take a look at the mistakes startup teams can make when shaping product experiences and how to avoid them.
Why start-up teams should pay special attention to user experience
A good user experience can increase user satisfaction, improve the quality and image of the product itself, and thus promote better development of your business. If you have a product that a lot of people are happy with, marketing it becomes a lot easier.
In addition, products with good experience can also greatly reduce customer service costs, and can also help your team or company establish positive public relations influence and lay a solid foundation for future business development.
On the contrary, poor user experience will have a huge negative impact on start-up teams and products. Bad news spreads like wildfire. If users are unhappy, they will spread negative word of mouth. In severe cases, your product will be difficult to turn around.
I really like the words of an entrepreneurial guru. Don’t try to please users. The important thing is to create happy users through products.
It is much easier to establish a positive image of the product in the minds of users through a good experience from the beginning than to dissatisfy users and then try to change it. Good user experience is never defined by a huge investment or a massive customer service team. It's a concept that surrounds the product cycle from start to finish. It's an attitude and culture.
(User experience) and customer experience
Smart teams will always put customer value at the core and dig into it through a complete set of experience strategies. This strategy covers many aspects such as user experience, branding and marketing, aiming to create a comprehensive and unique experience model for customers.
In the past, many companies that focused on offline business mistakenly believed that even if their websites were not so easy to use, there would not be much of a problem. After all, offline is the focus. This notion is hard to hold today because every touchpoint between a user and a company contributes to the overall customer experience. In this competitive market environment, many new players will keep their eyes open and look for opportunities to make breakthroughs in areas where user experience has not been truly achieved.
Products that provide a unique customer experience are usually excellent and surprising. What we can think of include large companies such as , , , and start-up teams such as .
Now we will get to the point and look at the typical mistakes that startup teams may make in terms of product experience.
. Good experience, wrong product
The right product should have characteristics such as simplicity, focus, and compliance with the business model. Many websites and mobile applications have beautiful interfaces and outstanding interaction modes, but when you become interested and learn more about them, you will find that they do not bring obvious use value to users. The problem is that either this product does not meet a certain popular need or the solution it provides itself has problems. To create an excellent user experience, we must first ensure that the direction of the product itself is correct before starting specific design work.
. The work is started too late and the execution is slow
User experience design work including user research and competitive product analysis should be followed up in the project at the early stage of the product. This will help to explore the direction of the product and Product concept mining. In addition, early product prototypes and usability testing can also help us discover potential problems in product functions and interaction models as early as possible, reducing the risk of redesigning or even starting over at a later stage.
Try to use the lean user experience way of thinking to build minimal product functions based on user needs and usage scenarios and around the core use cases to keep iterations moving forward quickly. This will help start-up teams enter the market at the lowest cost and at the highest speed.
. Lack of clear value proposition
To build a healthy and lasting relationship between products and users, we must first initiate a dialogue with users in the right way from the perspective of the product. If you can't effectively grab the user's attention and let them understand important information within a few seconds, then there is a high chance that they will not actually convert into customers. Creating a simple and clear value proposition is not easy, but once you do it, it can help you present the core elements of your product to users in the shortest possible time, allowing users to understand the difference between your product and similar applications in the market.
When writing a value proposition copy, try to think about what kind of value they can get from your product and what kind of goals they can accomplish from the user's perspective. The purpose of the value proposition is to make users have a concept of your product in the shortest possible time and want to continue to understand it, so you should try to keep the copy short and easy to read.
. Lack of focus
A misunderstanding that startup teams can easily fall into is that they hope to do too many things in a short period of time. Specifically, they want to build too many product features. Try to focus on one or more points, which will help reflect the core value of the product and make it easier to communicate and interact with target users. A large and comprehensive product may ultimately fail to truly meet the needs of any user group.
Take applications such as (file storage and sharing) and (photo sharing) as examples. Their success is inseparable from concentration, which is to do one thing to the extreme. This is by no means as simple as it sounds. Many times we need to face external influencing factors such as the voices of users, suggestions from investors or internal decision-makers, etc. Sometimes we must know how to say different and learn the necessary communication skills to get support and recognition for our design decisions.
. Lack of Usability Testing
Even if faced with a lack of time and labor costs, start-up teams still cannot ignore the importance of usability testing for the product. It is true that user research methods such as questionnaires, focus groups, and user interviews have their own advantages, but they cannot replace usability testing, an observation method that allows users to interact directly with product prototypes. In this process, you are likely to obtain feedback from users. Unexpected information.
A famous example of usability testing is the button worth billions of dollars. Once a large online retailer found that they were losing a large number of customers during the payment process, so they hired usability experts to help conduct usability testing. Through observation, he found that users were disgusted by the fact that they had to register an account before paying. A common complaint was that I came to shop rather than to establish a membership relationship.
Based on this observation, they decided to change the login button in the payment link to continue and tell users that they can shop directly without registering, but registration will bring related conveniences. This alone changed the retailer's sales that night by 1%, and that year's sales increased by a full 100 million U.S. dollars.
Never assume for granted that your product is easy to use because we are too familiar with our product and cannot truly objectively judge it from the user's perspective.
. Too many forms
The role of forms in a website or mobile application product is to allow the system to obtain user input. This is a sensitive interaction point and often a lack of well-designed forms is a big reason why users abandon the product.
Almost all websites use forms, such as in search, subscription, transaction payment, registration and login, etc. You need to really consider each form carefully whether the interaction method in the details is reasonable and easy to use, otherwise users are likely to feel frustrated or even annoyed in these links.
Fortunately, the book Form Design has brought some changes to the world. More and more people are beginning to pay attention to form design.
Detailed adjustments in the form can sometimes bring considerable returns to the website, including an increase in conversion rate. Don’t throw a form with multiple fields at the user’s fingertips and try to group them into logical or operational steps. It is necessary to stand from the user's perspective and understand what kind of mode can make them feel more comfortable. After all, the more fields you use in a form, the more likely they are to be unable to complete it. Usually students in the marketing department like to ask as many questions as they can in the form. The consequence of this method is that the form completion rate on the user side is greatly reduced.
. Let developers write copy
Think back to your experience using other websites or mobile apps. Have you ever felt like you were being treated like a fool or felt like those unfriendly, harsh prompts were directed at you? Yell? In fact, in many cases, the small and scattered copywriting in the product is written by technical staff during the development process. This situation is quite puzzling. Information copywriting is an important interaction point for products to communicate with users, but we actually allow ourselves to leave it to people who lack professional skills in this area to complete it!
As the designer said, copywriting should be simple and powerful. It should be fast, light, and effective. It can be a sentence, a phrase, a few words, or a single word. It should be short but impactful. Through reasonable copywriting, you can effectively connect products and users. Make sure that the style and tone of the copywriting are consistent in every aspect of the product. Also, using some non-written language from time to time can also improve users' favorable impression of the product.
. Lack of emotion and personality
Give the product an appropriate personality. For a long time we have been focusing on features and usability. Now it’s time to think about how to incorporate personality into the product experience.
Whether you are building an online application or a simple display page, you can try emotional design ideas in your design. Whether it is funny, friendly, serious or cautious, as long as the personality reflected in the design is in line with the characteristics of the product itself, it can create a long-lasting and profound impression in the minds of users.
. Technology becomes an obstacle
Many websites look like a machine to users. This situation is sometimes caused by technical factors. Let technology serve the product. If a certain technology cannot bring a high-quality user experience to the product, then consider other solutions. Not because the computer (or developer) says
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