Why user experience will fail as a department

Photo credit: THE GEEKOCRACY

According to the definition by the Nielsen Norman Group, a leading voice in the user experience field, user experience is all aspects of the end-users’ interaction with the company — its services and its products.

The overall user experience encompasses more than just the user interface, thus having a team of user experience (UX) professionals working on different stages of a project (requirement gathering, design, usability testing, etc) might not suffice in providing pleasant overall user experience. The empathic mindset of understanding the users and striving to create a product that meets their needs should be shared by everyone at all stages of product development, and even after.

It’s not just about the user interface

Though it is extremely important to pay enough attention to creating user friendly interfaces and getting the information architecture right, user experience goes beyond that.

Users interact with your brand in various ways: through your website, newsletters, social media, call centres, enquiry emails – the traditional UX teams have very little impact on many of these, but they all are part of user experience.

Unhelpful support messages that use terminology unfamiliar to a typical user or irrelevant marketing emails frustrate users, but these issues could hardly be spotted by doing traditional user testing. It is important to take note of the Halo effect – a negative (or positive) impression of one aspect of your company can affect the user’s perception of the company as a whole.

It is thus important to make sure that everyone involved develops a mindset of understanding users and their needs.

Everyone plays a part in streamlining the user experience

Photo credit: Fouquier ॐ

User experience should be the responsibility of everyone in the team.

Copywriters need to understand the users, their interests and preferences in order to tailor content using the appropriate tone and terminologies. Blog posts need to be meaningful and useful to a particular audience.

Developers need to keep users in mind when implementing ideas – things such as slow page loads will significantly affect the user experience.

 User experience should be the responsibility of everyone in the team.

The quality assurance team needs to understand user preferences. Product managers need to have a full understanding of the target audience and their needs when making decisions on which new features to implement, and focus on continuously improving the quality of the product. Even though product managers and UX team members often manage the process of creating a good user experience, they often do not have the relevant knowledge other team members may have.

It is the end result that ultimately matters