User Experience (UX) is a discipline that creates solutions for people to achieve the maximum efficiency with the least effort while using a product or benefiting from a service. When we think about websites or general software products, the interaction of a user visiting a site with the site itself is the subject of user experience. The people who think about, shape, and design this experience are called user experience designers.
In recent years in Turkey, the importance of user experience and interface design, which are actually crucial milestones in the success of a product or service you offer, has been recognized. YouTube and Facebook, which have become global companies before our eyes, although they appear as perfect tools that meet a need, initially stood out from their competitors thanks to a better user experience.
With the competition emerging in almost every sector, brands are constantly looking for ways to differentiate themselves and impress customers. User experience is the first step you can take in the process of creating a new product or service to meet customer expectations. Therefore, it is an element that needs to be considered at the initial stages of the business plan and requires energy and budget allocation.
User experience is too important to be left to a person's tastes. To design a UX-rich software product, it is necessary to benefit from experiences obtained from different disciplines such as psychology, marketing, communication, and engineering, in addition to good aesthetic thought.
A UX designer should be able to look at facts from the customer's perspective and test potential scenarios. Solving problems encountered in these scenarios will be your biggest helper on the road to obtaining a useful product.
Why is User Experience Important?
User experience is very important because people are becoming increasingly impatient. Any experience that causes the slightest time loss or doubt in the user can cast a dark cloud over all the good things you've done.
One of the things that make user experience valuable is the change in online shopping habits. The increase in mobile device usage and the exponential growth of internet shopping have forced businesses in almost every field to invest in these areas. The internet quickly became an uncontrollable market, good and bad, quality and non-quality. After a while, people began to hesitate in making purchasing decisions in this crowd. Not only risks related to the product but also problems in security led to the emergence of a hesitant user base.
While having a website was once a great privilege, it became a luxury in just a few years, and then a necessity. Then, responsive websites that provide flexibility in design for mobile devices emerged. This trend, which only lasted 5 years, was already missing its old glorious days. People turned their eyes to interactive websites and applications. In short, everything related to technology and the internet world is changing at an incredible speed. Competition continues to show itself harshly in every field. As competition increases, it becomes more difficult to make sales through websites or applications. The primary condition for convincing the user is to have a flawless user experience...
UX design focuses on the user, that is, the human. The task of a user experience designer is to make the product functional, safe, practical, and enjoyable for people. Only applications with these basic features can offer people a differentiating experience. If you have a product affected by competition, perhaps what you need to do is to think independently of the product and improve your processes.
The frequency of people visiting a website, their interaction rate with the site, the time they spend on the site, and the rate of online shopping on the website are parameters that are directly proportional. This means that if you want to achieve gains such as sales or brand awareness through your website or mobile application, you need to find setups that will encourage people to spend time on these platforms. This brings us to the topic of designing interaction.
Interaction Design
Interaction design is the planning and implementation of the interaction between humans and machines. It is a known fact that as the interaction rate increases, people are more inclined to repeat visits and potential purchases. Therefore, at this point we have reached, it is necessary to design user interaction as well as user experience.
Interaction design requires the use of knowledge from marketing communication and psychology, in addition to general design knowledge. Especially when talking about concepts that bring the desired experience to the user and then encourage the user to share this experience, it may be necessary to make deeper analyses using benefits from different disciplines.
Whether a product physically exists or is only accessible through digital platforms, interfaces must be parallel to user inclinations and should be able to convince the user intuitively that they are achieving the highest efficiency with the least effort.
“Writing is seeing the future.” Paul Valéry