The 7 factors that influence user experience

In 2004 Peter Morville, an information architect, created a 7-facet honeycomb to guide those concerned with user experience. Governments, Fortune 500 companies, website codes, and more strive to respect their guidelines.

Every organization strives to improve the overall product experience and delivers quality service to meet customer satisfaction. On the other hand, they use a variety of techniques to improve user experience.

There are 7 factors that define the user experience, according to Peter Morville a pioneer in the UX field who wrote several of UX’s best-selling books:

• Useful
• Usable
• Findable
• Credible
• Desirable
• Accessible
• Valuable

Let’s take a look at each specialty and what it means for general user information:

Useful

it simply means that Your content should be fresh and clear to fulfill the need.

Product usability increases or falls through the quality of its design. If the product does not work for someone why would you want to bring it to market?

It is noteworthy that “useful” catches the eye of the beholder and objects can be considered “useful” if they bring non-functional benefits such as pleasing or pleasing beauty.

When you make products that the consumer does not use, they may experience negative effects. So, make sure you bring useful products to customers in a great way.

Good designers often plan how they can make their work seem useful to users. One of the most useful things will be reviews, which show users the right information about products.

Usable

The website should be easy to use and users should be able to achieve their goal effectively, efficiently, and intuitively.

Usability is concerned with enabling users to successfully use their products effectively and efficiently.

Assume you have added an active feature to your website or app, but if it is not usable, it will ruin the user experience.

Designers should make sure that all the features and options included are easy to use. It has never been a good idea to give your users half-done work.

For a website to be useful it must provide objectives for the target audience that is usable. Communication should not require much thought or effort, as it is well-planned and accurate. When it comes to websites, 94% of consumers want an easy-to-use one.

Findable

Availability leads to the notion that a product should be straightforward to find and in the case of digital and information products. If you cannot find a product, you will not purchase it and that is true for all possible users.

It is important to display the necessary information to the relevant users in a convenient way.

the acquisition factor is very important for all businesses. It is best to advertise your product in newspapers, websites, social media platforms, and many other platforms that are only possible for advertisement.

Consider a simple example; if you have picked up a newspaper and all the stories in it are given in a page layout, rather than categorized by categories such as Sports, Entertainment, business, politics, research, etc. You may find reading the newspaper very annoying. 

The more steps you need to take to do something, the more your user feels harassed. 

Availability is important to the user experience(UX) of various products.

Credible

Credible refers to the consumer’s capability to trust your product and the services you provide that is the users should trust and believe what they are being told.

Without trust, consumers will not buy any products or services from you.

Making your products more reliable joins customer testimonials on your website to provide your particular product or service.

In the past, Toyota has faced many recollections over the years.

According to Edmunds.com, “More than 34 million vehicles in the United States and millions more worldwide are involved in Takata Airbag recalls, which took place in 2014.”

Toyota has blundered and not made a reliable product which is why they have made it even harder to trust their products.

Of the nearly 250,000 products introduced each year in the U.S., 85-95% fail due to users’ lack of trust in the product, regardless of their quality. 

It is almost impossible to bring the user experience if the user thinks that the originator of the product is false, anointed with malicious intent.

Randall Terry said; “I have cheated you once, I have been ashamed of you. I cheated twice, I was embarrassed. ”Today’s users will not give you a second chance to cheat – there are many options in almost every field to choose a reliable product provider.

Desirable

Desirable means that your website or app is used and apprised by the person who found it the best done. The most widely trusted commodities have the most desirable feature of the product, the design, its use, and cost.

A good user experience leaves a good impression of your website or app to its users.

The attraction is conveyed to product design, image, identity, beauty, and emotional design. 

Desirable value is measured when you return with satisfied customers who play an important role in growing your business by spreading news of your product and telling how much they were satisfied by that.

Therefore, it is important to increase your product value which can lead to better user experience.

For the most desirable product, it is possible for the user to be proud of it and create a desire for other users.

It simply means using an image, brand, product type, and other design elements to evoke emotion and appreciation for your product.

Accessible

Information intended for everyone should be accessible to everyone. In fact, content needs to be available to people with disabilities also.

The more user-friendly your site is, regardless of age or ability, the more effective it will be. 

One of the most easily accessible opportunities in app development and website development is to embrace UX-enhancing features for those with visual impairments.

It is about providing an experience that is not available to full-time users – this includes those with disabilities such as hearing loss, blurred vision, impaired mobility or impaired function.

Accessibility is often seen by companies as a waste of money because of the idea that people with inabilities make up a small fraction of the population. But think that if 1 in 4 people in your audience will not be able to use your product only because it is not available for them then 25% of your total market will be lost by you.

It is also important to remember accessibility when you design a product.

Do not ignore access to the user experience. Unlocking an accessible user experience also shows that you care about everyone and that will help you to elevate your brand reputation.

Valuable

The product must bring the value of the business it affects to the user who purchases or uses it. Without value, it is possible that any initial product extension will eventually be limited.

The value of a design can be measured by the price of problem-solving solutions. Nothing works like a less expensive design to solve the problem of expensive costs.

Whenever you bring a product or service, make sure it delivers the best results that add value to your product. 

The product should not affect the usefulness of your company and customers over time. Lack of value can damage your business reputation.

In addition, you can improve the user experience or value factor by providing opportunities for customers to express their feedback on your website through reviews.

To sum up things, we have observed seven factors that play a key role in determining the performance of user experience. Adopt these seven factors and improve your product user experience successfully.

Product success depends on Useful, Usable, Findable, Credible, Desirable, Accessible, Valuable.

Having these 7 features in the products is likely to be successful in the market place.

Icon Hollow vs. Solid

In UI design, what scenario should hollow icons and solid icons be applied to? Some believe that the hollow icons are visually more complex than the solid icons, while the solid icons are in fact more recognizable.

The opinions of designers on this topic varies. Some designers think that the hollow icons is made by lines, as a result of which, they are more difficult to recognize. However, they gives users a feeling of ease and exquisiteness. Others deem that the recognizability has nothing to do with this topic, but depends on the shape, color and other factors of the icon.

1. The function of icons.

First, this topic focuses on a specific type of icons: functional icon. Let’s take a look at the basic functions of this type of icons.

Functional icons are common in life, usually seen in the airport, stations, hotels, shopping malls and other large public places, providing guidance to people, as shown below:

In UI design, icons are one of the most common elements. The use of the icon originated in the Macintosh 1.0, even in the earlier Xerox graphical interface began. They are often given functions like action, description and so on.

Since the release of the smart phone system so far, the style of graphical interface has completed the transformation from the material design to the flat design evolution. With the introduction of ios7, almost all of the icons in Apps are becoming more and more flat and slim. The reason of it is that the over-eye-catching icons usually reduce the readability of the contents.

In general, the most basic function of the icons is to convey the information quickly.

In today's design work, the matching of icons and texts has reached a point of obsession. In fact, it is enough to express some abstract concepts with text. Putting an icon aside actually helps nothing about making users build connections between the icon and its function.

Nevertheless, icons are still relatively important. The function of icons is far more than“telling users the meaning at the first sight”. In addition, there are also many important features like immediate locating, content layer distinguishing and interface rhythm increasing.

Take a prototype example on Mockplus for example, if you just see the icons without the texts, the meaning of them is quite obscure. However, the functions of icons are more than that. The icons in the prototype is solid. The icons and the text together form a unity, in which the icons plays a role of alignment. If you remove the icons, the information in the list will be indistinguishable and there will be a visual confusion. Users will face more difficulty when focusing on the options on a line.

2. Are solid icons more recognizable?

Given that you were summoned by the call of nature and rushed into the big mall to find the rest room. Solid icons or hollow icons? Which can be recognized more quickly?

Solid icons are indeed more recognizable in the perspective of visual attraction. The following picture shows the influence of the elements that are attractive to the human eye (sorted from left to right):

Hollow icons attract the eye by their shapes while the solid ones do the same by their color. As a result, hollow icons are more difficult to recognize.

As early as the iOS7 system was introduced, there have been some discussion about this topic. Curt Arledge, an experienced designer who graduated from Viget, wrote an APP specifically, and did 1260 recognition tests for solid and hollow icons [1], look at the test results:

The results found that the difference of the speed of recognizing these two types of icons is just 0.1 seconds.

In the first group, the solid icons won. These icons are derived from life, the icons kept their original meanings. The recognition speed depends on how much the color and shape attract the eyes. So the solid icons are easier to recognize.

It is worth noting that the three hollow icons are more recognizable in the second group.

These three icons are abstracted from subjects in real life, among which the speech bubble does not exists at all. Designers create this icon in the graphical interface and endow it with a meaning; The forms of garbage bin and keys are various in life, so the icons of them are abstract summaries of them. In this case, the shape of the icons allows users to quickly identify the meaning of the icons, while the colors has become a factor of interference.

So, for icons expressing the same meaning of the original subjects, solid icons are more recognizable. For icons that endowed with abstract meanings, hollow icons are better.

A List of User Experience Goals That UX Designers Should Set

User experience design plays an important role in product design process. But what is good user experience on earth? Is there any criterion? The following 5 user experience goals, listed in a logical order, may help you to find the right direction of user experience design ASAP and make you an excellent UX designer.

Goal 1: “I got what I need”

To give users what they need is the first goal of user experience design. Before using a product, people are mostly concerned about “whether it is useful?” “Will this product solve my problems?” So a product should meet the functional demands of users first (not only those existed demands, but also potential ones). Doing user research is a good way to find out users’ demands, but objectively, it’s hard to measure users’ needs precisely, even if it was huge company which has advanced user survey technologies.

For example, Facebook at the beginning didn’t take “making friends with strangers (say, a friend’s friend)” seriously as they believed that people only have curiosities on their surroundings; social network is essentially “a game among acquaintances”. However the data show that most of users like to expand their circles by adding strangers as their friends. Now social platform also contributes a lot to companies and brands who want more influence online. They put money and energy on operating an official page to promote their products. All of these are unexpected demands for the early designers. Thus, collecting users’ feedback constantly and make use of data or other materials to follow your users’ activities is also a key to meet users’ demands. If UX designers don’t give users what they want, the users will give a shit.

Goal 2: “Don’t make me think”

“Will I get what I want in a most simple, direct and quick way?” It would be better if you “Don’t make me think”.

The top-download games in app store are always those like “Don't Tap the White Tile”, which people can play without brains. This shows the laziness nature of human beings. But laziness is also an important drive of technology development. As a UX designer, we have no reason to go against it unless we want to make products that are “anti-human”.


How to design to give users what they want in the easiest way? First UX designers should be a mastery of the user stories & scenario of products. Which are important things that users pay much attention to? Which are secondary? How to simplify the operations by taking advantage of users’ habits? As to user interface, whether the flat design method should be adopted to enable users to get most information at the first sight. Besides, the usability of products also depends on the design tools you choose. A complicated-to-use prototype/wireframe tool is a bad design itself, so how can we make good UI or product prototype with it?

Goal 3: “I really enjoy using it”

Many products have similar functions, which can all meet the users’ needs to some extent. But only few of them are favored by users, why? As a music lover, I go to a concert at least once a month. Among these concerts of any scale, there are some which thrilled me from start to finish. It seems that the design of a music concert has nothing to do with product design, but as I have been immerging in design circle for many years I gradually found that an exciting concert is just like a product offering good user experience, both of them give you the right thing at the right time.


At an evening dinner, the starter is always delicate but of low volume. Gradually, under the influence of some spirits, the main course was served, at this moment the light is warmest and the atmosphere is the best. The ending part is usually made easy. This is a very good example to explain that “UX Designers should have a sense of rhythm (of product)”. When designing video player software, how many “ss” should the “black screen” last to draw the users’ attention, but never make them feel impatient? Why some social platforms only allow its users to access more functions after a period of time? Those are all questions that user experience designers should concern about.

Goal 4: Habit is a second nature

“Whether the product is attractive enough for me to use it for a long term?”, and even “becomes part of my life” and “makes me addicted to it”.

In the article “UX/UI Designer Skills Valued by Facebook” I mentioned that one important reason that Facebook became a huge social platform with over 200 million users is that FB knows the mental & psychological needs of users: people win others’ attention on Facebook, which they didn’t get in real life. “Helping people to build a strong connection with external world; enabling them to follow and be followed, these are what a social platform was born for.” A functionally powerful product will no doubt be favored by people. But a product which forms a new habit has immeasurable potential. Electric light, mobile phones, new transportations; Wechat, Whatsapp, these are all among the latter.

Goal 5: Make users your promoters

“Whether the product is good enough to motivate me to become one of its promoters?”


If a designer set the above 4 user experience goals when designing a product, he would be an excellent designer. The last goal, as far as I can see, is the inherent property of an excellent design: to mobilize its users. As we all know, users are the best spokesmen of your products. Companies may seek help from all kinds of resources to promote their products: KOL, famous blogger, web celebrities. However, none of them is as powerful as users. You may ask: why does product promotion has something to do with designers? If UX designers can build a relationship between the users and potential users, for example, put a “sharing on Twitter” button on the right place, there might be more people will join in (this is a method of most basic level). For another example, users need to cooperate with others when using the product (like game products). In short, to mobilize your users and make them your promoters is also an important user experience goals that good UX designers should set.

4 Common UX Challenges and How to Find Them

User Experience design is all about getting people to use our products. We’re not so much concerned with people buying our products, that’s sales and marketing’s focus, we’re concerned with the way that people adopt our products into their lives. We want to create lasting relationships that create brand loyalty, repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations.

There are four areas of user perception that can encourage or discourage adoption of our products. Let’s take a look at each of them and how we might be able to examine them in our UX research:

Perception of Value

In order for customers to adopt a product; they need to see the value in that product. Products can deliver positive impacts but if they’re not seen to deliver positive impacts; the perception of value is low or non-existent.

It’s also possible to produce products without such an impact that customer’s perceive to have value anyway. The entire homeopathic health industry relies on this to generate billions in revenue each year. Sugar pills are sugar pills and their benefits are pure placebo (there are much cheaper ways to buy sugar than through a homeopathic practitioner) but customers of homeopaths perceive a benefit and thus keep buying that sugar at incredibly inflated prices.

We begin examining the perception of value with the product’s value proposition. If the value cannot be clearly articulated in house – it seems unlikely that it’s going to be easy for a user to articulate the value. We can test that by seeing if, after reviewing our marketing material or website, the potential user can articular the value.

Then we need to examine two other perceptions – the first is the question of utility; “Is this product useful to you?” but we should also remember that people buy plenty of things that aren’t useful so much as they are enjoyable (think computer games or novelty products) and we should ask; “Is this product fun to use?” too.

Level of Certainty

We move on from perception of value to the level of certainty that our product delivers on its perceived value. Is it as fun or as useful as it appears to be at first glance? More importantly do customers believe that you can deliver on that perceived value before they even touch the product?

New technologies can often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Driverless cars, which are currently in development, may sound fantastic but the true test of their staying power will be – do people trust cars to drive them from A to B in a safe and reliable manner?

If the level of certainty when responding to that question is low… there’s a major mountain to climb to convince people to become users in the first place. A lack of user confidence in the product is going to be a huge barrier to their adopting that product.

For driverless cars that certainty may come from the power of the brands developing them – people tend to trust names like Google because they see them as capable of delivering technologically advanced solutions, they might be less trusting if the driverless car came from a brand new startup with no track record in the market.

You can measure the level of certainty by asking your users what they think the chances of a successful product are, or what problems they anticipate with a product.

Is the Product Accessible?

Accessibility is a measure of two separate components. The first is convenience, how convenient is the product to use? Why are bicycles so unpopular for short journeys – when it’s clear they’re so easy to use for this purpose? Well, there’s the weather, the lack of bicycle parking in many places, the behaviour of other drivers, the likelihood of theft, etc. it turns out that while bicycles have usability in spades – they often lack convenience.

The second component is usability and that’s something that most UX designers will be intimately familiar with. Usability is a part of UX rather than the whole of it but we all know that if a product is hard to use – adoption is hard to win.

It’s important to examine both convenience and usability during testing and to measure them as early as possible. An inaccessible product won’t find it easy to keep users in the long-term.

Does the Product Engender Trust?

Users are concerned for their safety, their privacy, their financial security, etc. If your product raises concerns – you need to work out how to address these with your users in order to get them to adopt the product. You cannot ignore the need for users to trust a service, you need to bridge the gap.

For example, internet banking still has large amounts of resistance, despite its convenience because in many places – people aren’t convinced of the security aspects of the system. They may not have their own computers at home and working in an internet café can leave someone quite apprehensive about accessing their financial accounts.

Or imagine that you want to use geo-locations in a mobile application. Will you users be OK with you sharing that data with others? If not, how can you ensure that data is held securely without impinging on functionality?

There are many ways that a user may not trust a product and the UX researcher’s job is to work out where these pain points lay.

You may also want to ensure that you under-promise and over-deliver in your marketing materials rather than vice-versa. There’s no quicker way to kill someone’s trust than to promise something that seems “too good to be true”.  Again you can test marketing collateral with users before you put it out in the wider world.

Summary

Ensuring that users adopt our products for long-term use is part of designing a great user experience. The four areas discussed above are critical for this. Fortunately, they’re all things we can examine in our research and resolve before we go to market – as long as we’re looking for them in the first place.

4 Common UX Challenges and How to Find Them

User Experience design is all about getting people to use our products. We’re not so much concerned with people buying our products, that’s sales and marketing’s focus, we’re concerned with the way that people adopt our products into their lives. We want to create lasting relationships that create brand loyalty, repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations.

There are four areas of user perception that can encourage or discourage adoption of our products. Let’s take a look at each of them and how we might be able to examine them in our UX research:

Perception of Value

In order for customers to adopt a product; they need to see the value in that product. Products can deliver positive impacts but if they’re not seen to deliver positive impacts; the perception of value is low or non-existent.

It’s also possible to produce products without such an impact that customer’s perceive to have value anyway. The entire homeopathic health industry relies on this to generate billions in revenue each year. Sugar pills are sugar pills and their benefits are pure placebo (there are much cheaper ways to buy sugar than through a homeopathic practitioner) but customers of homeopaths perceive a benefit and thus keep buying that sugar at incredibly inflated prices.

We begin examining the perception of value with the product’s value proposition. If the value cannot be clearly articulated in house – it seems unlikely that it’s going to be easy for a user to articulate the value. We can test that by seeing if, after reviewing our marketing material or website, the potential user can articular the value.

Then we need to examine two other perceptions – the first is the question of utility; “Is this product useful to you?” but we should also remember that people buy plenty of things that aren’t useful so much as they are enjoyable (think computer games or novelty products) and we should ask; “Is this product fun to use?” too.

Level of Certainty

We move on from perception of value to the level of certainty that our product delivers on its perceived value. Is it as fun or as useful as it appears to be at first glance? More importantly do customers believe that you can deliver on that perceived value before they even touch the product?

New technologies can often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Driverless cars, which are currently in development, may sound fantastic but the true test of their staying power will be – do people trust cars to drive them from A to B in a safe and reliable manner?

If the level of certainty when responding to that question is low… there’s a major mountain to climb to convince people to become users in the first place. A lack of user confidence in the product is going to be a huge barrier to their adopting that product.

For driverless cars that certainty may come from the power of the brands developing them – people tend to trust names like Google because they see them as capable of delivering technologically advanced solutions, they might be less trusting if the driverless car came from a brand new startup with no track record in the market.

You can measure the level of certainty by asking your users what they think the chances of a successful product are, or what problems they anticipate with a product.

Is the Product Accessible?

Accessibility is a measure of two separate components. The first is convenience, how convenient is the product to use? Why are bicycles so unpopular for short journeys – when it’s clear they’re so easy to use for this purpose? Well, there’s the weather, the lack of bicycle parking in many places, the behaviour of other drivers, the likelihood of theft, etc. it turns out that while bicycles have usability in spades – they often lack convenience.

The second component is usability and that’s something that most UX designers will be intimately familiar with. Usability is a part of UX rather than the whole of it but we all know that if a product is hard to use – adoption is hard to win.

It’s important to examine both convenience and usability during testing and to measure them as early as possible. An inaccessible product won’t find it easy to keep users in the long-term.

Does the Product Engender Trust?

Users are concerned for their safety, their privacy, their financial security, etc. If your product raises concerns – you need to work out how to address these with your users in order to get them to adopt the product. You cannot ignore the need for users to trust a service, you need to bridge the gap.

For example, internet banking still has large amounts of resistance, despite its convenience because in many places – people aren’t convinced of the security aspects of the system. They may not have their own computers at home and working in an internet café can leave someone quite apprehensive about accessing their financial accounts.

Or imagine that you want to use geo-locations in a mobile application. Will you users be OK with you sharing that data with others? If not, how can you ensure that data is held securely without impinging on functionality?

There are many ways that a user may not trust a product and the UX researcher’s job is to work out where these pain points lay.

You may also want to ensure that you under-promise and over-deliver in your marketing materials rather than vice-versa. There’s no quicker way to kill someone’s trust than to promise something that seems “too good to be true”.  Again you can test marketing collateral with users before you put it out in the wider world.

Summary

Ensuring that users adopt our products for long-term use is part of designing a great user experience. The four areas discussed above are critical for this. Fortunately, they’re all things we can examine in our research and resolve before we go to market – as long as we’re looking for them in the first place.

How to Improve Website Usability: Top Guidelines

Who said it is that easy to design, craft and maintain great websites that are both beautiful and effective? Surely, there is a million ways to do that, but also a million ways to fail.

Let's see what to do to achieve the desired result!

Generally, websites come in 3 types:

1. The main feature of the 1st type is a creative and stunning design. Websites like this will make you say “Wow”. But, unfortunately, sometimes, they have nothing more to offer.

2. Websites of this type may lack in creativity and design, but they will give you what you’re looking for in less than a minute! Don’t you agree that’s a good reason to close your eyes on the fact they don’t attract you visually?

3. And here go the winning ones. Websites, creators of which managed to combine usability and eye-catching design. The best type, especially from a marketing perspective. Websites like this will keep users coming back again. In short: they work.

BUT: Who actually should be the winner in this everlasting battle of Usability vs Creativity? To answer this question you should go deep in user’s psychology.

Good-looking websites cost nothing if they don’t help to get leads, increase conversion, or sell.

You should do something more than just causing aesthetic pleasure to your users, if you want them to come back, not to just admire and leave. (Surely, not counting the case when what you provide is design service or anything related).

Hence, if your aim is to keep users coming back and staying loyal, you should consider the key principles of good website usability and user-centred design. This means focusing on users’ needs, providing them with products that are efficient and easy to use. If your website meets these requirements, you’ll gain trust. Simple, isn’t it? Also note that usability is not user-experience, though is correlated with it. The latter is about the positive feelings of the user. Nevertheless, making the website easy-to-use will make users happy, thus leading to better UX.

So let us start with simple key principles on increasing usability.

#1. Don’t Make Users Think

We didn’t invent a new bicycle. This is the most important usability rule, formulated by Steve Krug. (BTW, his famous book ''Don't Make Me Think!'' served as an inspiration for this post.)

The idea here is to make the web-page understandable on intuitive level, without conscious reasoning. Users should guess where to click and where to navigate to get what they want instinctively, without much thinking.

This is what inevitably makes them feel happy about your website. As an epic example we picked the website of MailChimp

Focused on simplicity and perfectly usable, it proves that to succeed you don’t have to do anything groundbreaking. The right things in the right places (where users expect them to be) make it all.

Another thing which is amazing about this website is that it sets the users free of such an awful thing like "Paradox of choice". So, we are slightly going to the next must-know principle.

#2. Avoid "The Paradox of Choice"

When somebody is faced with too many options, he/she can end up not making a decision or just choosing something already familiar. This paradox can be faced not only on web-pages offering too many options but anywhere in life, for example in a cafe with a broad menu. Paradox of choice can really annoy and make users leave or look for other more familiar options somewhere else.

To set users free of struggling to decide where to click on the website, MailChimp made it maximally easy.

Note, that only the essential options are offered and the right emphasises are made on call-to-actions, like SIGN-UP-FREE. The secondary options can be found in MORE, preventing the users of being paralysed by too many suggested options.

#3. Give Users What They Need Right Away

Users, navigating on the web-site, usually behave themselves just like in an ordinary store, where buyers don’t examine absolutely everything in details, they are just looking for the exact things they need. Similarly users are not reading, but just scanning the website. As soon as something matches their requirement, they are ready to click.

Lesson learned: Don’t make users think “This looks like too much reading.’’

Go visual to meet the needs of speed readers.

Here’s a good example of nicely visualized Pricing Plans of Bang2Joom .

Without making hard efforts the user can learn the advantages of each pricing plan, choosing the most suitable. No need to read extra texts and to try to compare. Everything is clean and simple!

#4 Include "SEARCH"

BUT: do it with caution if your website has limited content which isn’t frequently updated.

It’s better not to have SEARCH form, than to disappoint the user, who didn’t find what he/she was looking for.
However, in case of the websites with a lot of different content, like Wikipedia , SEARCH form is a must.

In addition, check the best-practice for Search Form:

• Search-box is set up on all the pages, not only the home-page.
• Search box is long, just like on Google, in order to make it easy for users to review or edit what they typed.
• Search should have logic. Offer your users an autofill for similar common searches. Besides, if users search the word "help", you may additionally offer some "Recommended Results" to support the users in need.

Apple’s website is one of the best examples of this practice.

#5 Know Your User

Young geeks love to explore new things. A bit complicated website, in case of a good content, may seem extremely interesting for youngsters. They may even love the challenge of discovering its options with curiosity while navigating through it. Just take a look onGamestop. There was a time I spent hours on this website and never even considered the fact that it is a little bit difficult to navigate through.

In case of adults, situation is not the same. They are more conservative. They love simplicity and are getting used to new things with unwillingness sometimes.

Hence, keeping the target auditory in mind while designing the website is essential.

Take Google for an example. Its users' age groups are extremely broad, but no one actually faces difficulties due to the right balance between simplicity and functionality.

Now let’s go through some more quick tips as a bonus!

• Always consider "Banner Blindness" - the fact, that users usually ignore anything that looks like an advertisement. They notice ads, but still ignore it. Try to avoid any elements on website, which look like an ad (for example, boxes of info on the right of the page).

• If you require registration, value the time of users. Minimize the number of fields to be filled, leaving the essential ones.

• Allow to UNSUBSCRIBE with one click. (And try to craft such valuable content, so that your users never even know, that UNSUBSCRIPTION was that easy).

• Never forget mobile users. Go responsive!

• Don’t make users use browser’s features to navigate. If they need to go “Back”, let them do it with using the option on the website, not on browser.

• Match the design and the content.

• Emphasize links. Never expect users to search for them hovering on words till the cursor changes to a pointer.

Hopefully, you’re now armed and willing to start improving your website usability to make visitors have a much more enjoyable experience browsing it next time.

Just keep in mind that these principles don’t pretend to be one-size-fits-all rules. Everything depends on details.

Summing up, we left one thing that actually works in any case. The last, but the most important one.

#6 Test!

Testing - this is the key to your next project success. As said above, there is a million of ways to design, build and maintain a great website! Just try to find yours. And, after taking any actions, be sure to check the efficiency and improve your strategy to achieve the better results! Good luck!

/Note: This article was originally published on Bang2Joom's Blog/

Lessons in Hospitality and User Experience Design

My team and I traveled to a satellite office this past week. Like many companies, our company has a list of preferred hotels that it recommends employees stay at when traveling for business. For the first time, I booked a hotel not included in this list. Ignoring the adage of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I decided to give the new Hyatt Place in town a chance. One by one, my teammates followed suit, until all seven of us were staying at Hyatt Place. Primed by positive reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp, and the beautiful, high-definition website photos, I walked in through the automatic doors with high expectations.

Act like you want to help me.

After checking in and settling into my room — suitcase unpacked, HBO movie on the television — I decided I needed a shower to wash away the long travel day. That was when things began to fall apart. After three or four unsuccessful attempts to turn on the shower, I phoned the lobby. No one answered my first call. On my second attempt, the front desk answered with a hurried:

“Um, yes.”

“Oh, hi. I think my shower is broken.”

“Um, fine, I’ll send someone up.”

This threw me off. First, I’d expected to be greeted with a professional welcome, a rendition of the standard but comforting, “My name’s Jennifer, how can I help you?” Second, I’d expected some form of an apology for the inconvenience.

When designing an e-commerce website for an information design class, we were instructed to be careful to ensure that the path to finding help was frictionless, and that entry points were plentiful. I should never be at a loss for where to turn for help, nor should I be made to feel like I’m inconveniencing you when I ask for it. This design principle extends beyond e-commerce, into any experience that involves a user interacting with a product or a service.

The above can be broken down into three simple guidelines:

1. Make it easy for me to find help.
2. Apologize for the fact that I need help.
3. Do not convey that my cries for help — however exaggerated — are insignificant. The need that the user is expressing is coming from some place, regardless of whether it’s ‘right,’ and that place needs to be traced and surveyed.

Hyatt Place struck out on all three.

Take me where I want to go.

Minutes later, I opened the door to a woman dressed in the hotel’s signature seasonal red. I described what was happening and, uncertainly, she asked if she could take a look at my shower. Once there, she began fiddling with the shower, retracing the movements that I had just gone through and aimlessly pulling on handles and pushing on buttons. At one point, she began turning the temperature control from hot to cold and then from cold to hot again:

“So, this just turns it on?”

Cue sinking feeling. This was not the right path to solving my problem.

Everyone has had the experience of calling customer service and being bounced from one person to another, with an eternity of hold music in between. It is an experience of surreal, sublime torture; panic expands in your heart as you wait, listening to Sheryl Crowe and thinking “is this really my life?”

When a user needs to solve a problem, there is nothing worse than following a series of misplaced signs into a labyrinth, past mirages and promises that never materialize. There is nothing like the blood-pressure-raising frustration that comes with reliving a Groundhog’s Day of the same conversations and the same steps, yet no closer to solving your problem. This is an insult to my time. More than anything else does, this tells me — in the loudest of volumes — that you don’t care.

If the first impression isn’t a good one, do everything you can to ensure that the second one is.

Unsurprisingly, she was unable to fix the shower. Instead, she decided to put me in another room. I agreed amiably, though mildly annoyed at having to re-pack and re-locate.

Thankfully, the second room was just across the hall. However, I noticed immediately that the room was frighteningly cold — despite the thermostat’s 75°F setting. I asked whether the heat was working and she assured me that it was, but would take a couple minutes to heat up.

Thirty minutes later, it was still cold. I once again phoned the lobby.

“I don’t think the heat is working.”

“It takes time…it’ll take at least half an hour.”

“Ok, thanks.”

Another thirty minutes passed. Still cold. It was now almost midnight and I was beginning to feel desperate for sleep before our first day at the office.

This was strike two. When a user first encounters a snafu in their experience — an error message, a broken interaction, a page that takes too many seconds to load — the situation is still salvageable. There’s a second chance waiting to be taken. It would be foolish to miss or misuse this opportunity to remedy the relationship. Whether it’s ensuring that the rest of the experience is impeccable or demonstrating a little extra TLC — a strategy that Lyft and Uber have mastered — the objective is to kiss and make up. How can I stay mad at a company that not only refunded my ride and ensured that I would never get the same driver again, but also added $5 credit to my account?

Devil (and delight) in the details.

The fun wasn’t quite over yet.

Get the basics right. A teammate mentioned that after returning to her room that evening, she’d noticed a towel strewn on the floor. When I returned to mine, I saw that the pajamas that I’d folded on my bed were inexplicably left on the television stand. My 3/4 empty shampoo and conditioner had not been replenished. My bathtub had been sloppily cleaned, and a clump of hair (mine, I hope) remained in the center. These are the ABCs of hospitality; I’m not sure you can get anymore fundamental than clean towels. There are similar basics in web and app design — a (largely) error-free experience, an onboarding experience that sets expectations, orients and guides you, familiar design patterns, and an effortless way to contact support — that are the foundation of the user experience.

The delight of everyday things. In the words of designer John Maeda, “When a small, unassuming object exceeds our expectations, we are not only surprised but pleased.” This is the philosophy behind ‘delightful’ moments, such as those documented in Little Big Details. In the hospitality industry, the possibilities for easter eggs are endless. At the Dylan in Dublin, Ireland, guests receive chocolate truffles from a local chocolatier and bottles of water every evening. My travel companion and I would sometimes skip dessert in anticipation of the truffles. “I’m so looking forward to those chocolates!” She once exclaimed laughingly during a cab ride home after dinner. Similarly, at The Element in Omaha, trays of fruit, disposable headphones, magazines, and towels welcome you at the the fitness center, silently saying, “we’re here to take care of you.” Such gestures create the impression of not only warmth and welcome, but also luxury and leisure. Isn’t that how a hotel stay is supposed to feel?

Find a sustainable solution.

It was my third call (fourth if you count the time no one picked up) to the lobby and I was beginning to feel frustrated.

“So…it’s still cold here.”

“Oh…so what do you want to do? I can have my security guard bring you blankets?”

Blankets. Was this the solution we were looking for, an ingenious old-school solution to a unnecessarily technological new-world problem?

“I didn’t think you’d want to move again…” she went on.

What I didn’t want was to continue to follow a winding rabbit hole wildly chasing the baseline amenities necessary for a pleasant week-long stay. I wanted to settle into a room that worked — shower, heat, the whole shebang — once and for all.

Unless absolutely necessary, the answer shouldn’t be a bandaid solution. In the age of minimum viable products and failing fast, it’s easy for ‘this will do’ to become the default. To be sure, there are times when workarounds are necessary, as work behind-the-scenes moves toward the right answer, the final answer. But, careful to avoid becoming a patchwork, Frankensteinian version of yourself.

One of the enduring lessons in product management is that trade-offs are an emblem of creating. Think about problems in terms of their importance and urgency, and about solutions in terms of feasibility and effort. In the end, I accepted the blankets, because, well, at 1am, the ease of the solution was perfect for the urgency of the situation