Customer’s expectations are changing. Customers are empowered with overwhelming options to choose the best from. Especially in the digital sphere, options are flooding and choices are confusing. With a plethora of options to choose from, customers naturally tend to use the one that is worth the money and time they spend.

The cost-effectiveness and value of a product aren’t always measured by its quantity. Most of the time, products are remembered by the customers for their quality, service, the difference they make, and the experience they provide. Talking about providing memorable experiences to customers in real time is an analogy to providing a stellar UX design in the digital space.

Mobile applications that provide convenient user experiences to their customers are the ones that last long not only in the customer’s memory but also in the market. Because as we discussed in the previous chapters, user experience is the key to win a customer’s heart and unlock mobile app success.

In this article, let’s get into the details of how to understand user experience from a business perspective as well as a customer’s viewpoint.

Here is a list of 7 core elements that you need to master if you want to provide excellent user experiences to your customers.

• Win your customer’s trust.
• Go the extra mile to make things easy for your users.
• Be empathetic: Wanna do that? Then, be there. 
• Draw inspirations from everything you see. 
• Never hesitate to experiment: Testing is the key! 
• Appreciate customer’s feedback.
• Master the art of winning your customer’s approval.

Here is a step-by-step walkthrough:

#1 Win your customer’s trust

In physical stores, you can build trust with your conversations, body language, and gestures. Mobile apps need to be considered as the digital equivalents to the physical stores, where user experience is the only way to earn your customer’s trust. The only possible reason if a customer in need doesn’t avail of your service or buy your product could be that they don’t trust you. 

Here’s a quick and easy-to-adopt list of hacks for you to follow to build trust using UX design.

• Be transparent.
• Be consistent.
• Be genuine and let your UX design reflect that.
• List the brands that you have worked with, in a way that is well-noticed.
• Feature genuine customer testimonials on your brand app. This adds authenticity and legitimacy along with trust.
• Have a feature where they can post feedback or raise disputes easily and directly. This reassures your genuineness and affirms that you are open to feedback.

#2 Go the extra mile to make things easy for your users

Did you know that the attention span of digital users is reaching new lows in recent times? Yes, with increasing numbers of distractions all around it isn’t easy for a digital user to consume content with complete attention. That said, imagine what’s the plight of content that is difficult to consume? Nobody wants to crack their head to have their bread. Nobody would choose a difficult option when a little extra effort and research can fetch them easier options. 

So, make things easy. Sometimes it’s going to take extra hours, effort, expertise, and bandwidth for app designers and developers to make things easy for the users. But, it’s totally worth it. At the end of the day, customers are going to love only the tasty meals they had and the easy apps they used. Delivering an easy user experience is always a win-win thing for both you and your users. So, yes – go take that extra mile now!

#3 Be empathetic: Wanna do that? Then, be there.

Empathy is one of the most important attributes in UX design principles for mobile. ‘Been there done that’ is a statement used to express familiarity with something. If you want your users to get familiar with your app, then you need to wear their shoes, get into their skin, address their pain points, translate your empathy and concern into the design. 

Here is a quick list on how to be empathetic while designing your mobile app UX:

• Do extensive research to understand your target audience, their goals, interests, concerns, and behavior.
• Pay meticulous attention to details. Be mindful about the intricate traits about your user base and target audience, and never take anything for granted. 
• Articulation is the key. Take a painstaking effort to articulate your mobile app design and content to its finest details.
• Express your empathy in a visually compelling way. Make your content and design sound rich in understanding the user’s emotions.
• Be on top of the latest UX trends and do research intensively with an aim to understand how your peers and competitors are reflecting the user’s needs and emotions. 

#4 Draw inspirations from everything you see

There is a famous saying that reads as ‘a good student is a good listener’. This applies to user experience engineers as well. Mobile app designers and developers need to draw inspiration from everything they see. When you develop mobile apps, keep in mind that you need to build the kind of apps that you want to use, in the first place. Every digital design regardless of the industry and sector can turn out to be an inspirational source for you to develop an outstanding design for your app. For that, your UX designers need to be open and willing to learn.

 #5 Never hesitate to experiment: Testing is the key! 

Derive a process in place where you make changes to your mobile app UX design on an incremental and iterative basis to have hands-on and real-time learning. There is a high chance that whatever we expect to work based on our convictions and learnings might actually not work in reality when tested with the customers. 

Multiple A/B testings and UX experiments help you to know what your potential users actually expect from you. The assumption is a big-time hindrance to learning especially when it comes to user experience. So, never ever hesitate to test, experiment, learn, and grow. ‘Create, test, repeat’ is the new mantra in the digital space. Experiments help a lot to study your customer behavior.

#6 Appreciate customer’s feedback 

Customer feedback and reviews are great tools to hear directly from your customers. Have a system in place to draw insights from your customer reviews, feedback, ratings, grievances, and disputes. Derive actionable items from the feedback-based insights. These action items need to align with your UX goals and go hand-in-hand with the UX designing. Incorporating your user experience design with customer feedback facilitates you to make your app intuitive and rich in usability.

The points below help you to understand how to approach customer feedback:

• Take every feedback seriously. Never take any feedback for granted.
• Categorize customer reviews. For example, technical issues, bugs, and issues can be considered as a group. Additional feature requests can be grouped together.
• Based on these categories, prioritize the fixes.
• Derive a UX roadmap to address the customer reviews based on the priority.
• Plan your app updates and releases based on your UX enhancement journey.   

#7 Master the art of winning your customer’s approval

Getting your customer’s approval isn’t an easy deal. But once you’ve unlocked the UX secret, then it is only a walk in the park. A good, easy-to-use and intuitive app is always remembered by the customers forever. Besides turning to be lifetime customers, they become your free ambassadors and advertisers. All you need to do is to invest your time, effort, and expertise in discovering the right user experience for your mobile apps.

How do apps with good UX win?

• Your users recommend your app to their friends on social media and digital forums.
• Your app will be discussed in real-time conversations. Its user-friendliness will be talked about. This is the best thing to happen to your app because nothing works like word-of-mouth marketing. Also, it’s free!
• Your brand awareness improves.
• You get a good rating and score in the search engines and app markets. Your user retention rate increases and uninstalls go down.

User experience is far more interesting than you can ever imagine. When you get your hands dirty on trying and erring with multiple user experience possibilities, you not only have your organic learning but also lay your own roadmap to destination. Because the one who knows your customer best is yourself.

In the chapters to come, we will get into the graphic details of prototyping and user persona creation. These are pivotal steps that help you to master user experience skills and develop mobile apps that outperform competition and stand out. 

Get in touch with us if you are looking for UX consulting services.  At Siam Computing, a team of mobile app experts, technology enthusiasts, user experience designers, UI designers and developers, programmers, marketplace SEO specialists, play store and app store analysts and hundreds of other certified specialists work with rigor and spirit to deliver out-of-the-box mobile app experiences.