Needless to say, the success of your product (i.e., a website or an app) depends on how users perceive it. And, User Experience (UX) plays a significant role in shaping perception about your web solution. UX is, basically, how a person feels when using your product. Several factors are crucial for rendering a good UX. However, many believe that usability is the most important factor that can help in creating a positive impact on users’ mind related to the use of a site or any other product.
While it’s true that usability plays a significant part in the user’s experience, but designing for UX encompasses more than merely making a product usable. Designing for emotion is more important than usability in today’s competitive era filled with plenty of usable components. Through this article, I want to clear that a perfect user experience is not only about improving the usability of your product; and how good design is necessary for a pleasurable user experience.
Moving Beyond Usability: Delivering a Delightful and Meaningful UX
Well, usability help people achieve their goals in an easy way, but it is not just limited to accomplishing what people want and covers a lot more – that helps in delivering an alluring and meaningful experience.
In short, people are now moving beyond usability and focusing more on delivering a truly fascinating experience that helps add value for users.
In essence, a good design is what helps in creating a more enjoyable user experience. After all, your website design is the first thing that user notices about your business. In fact, it helps in keeping users engaged with your site. Essentially, a design is the key to successful UX.
Key Points That Determine the Significance of Having a Good Design
Here we will be discussing some considerations that will help you understand the significance of creating a good design than focusing only on usability:
1. Seductive interface design
Even though you have spent enough time in making your product useful for your users; they might still leave the site if it can’t keep them happy and content. But usability is not about feelings and is concerned about fulfilling users’ goals. However, you can create a design based on your audience emotions and feelings.
It’s pretty obvious; you’ll like your users to feel happy before and after using your product. And, when your design is pleasing and seductive it will be difficult for people to ignore it. In fact, based on a popular quote by Stephen Anderson:
“At this point in experience design’s evolution, satisfaction ought to be the norm, and delight ought to be the goal.”
One excellent way to make your visitors empathize with you is: to show your brand personality in your website or app. It’s too easy for people to forget about a brand in the sea of other brands over the web. But, creating a seductive user interface design can help you connect with people for a long time. Although the use of an attractive interface is gaining acknowledgment only recently, it was coined long before by Jakob Nielsen – a famous usability advocate.
2. Creating playful design
Bear in mind, to create engaging user experiences, you might need to sacrifice ease of use and rather make your product a bit complicated. But, when it comes to usability we are required to focus on making the product easy-to-use and user-friendly. However, have you ever imagined about making something incredibly easy might lose it value.
Besides many studies conclude that “the brains love to play.” The same is the case with your website or app design. Making it too easy to use won’t leave much to explore for your audience, but creating a playful design will indeed keep users wanting for more.
Especially, when gaming apps are designed to bring more play are likely to attract users’ attention easily compared to relatively simple gaming applications. But, playfulness is not restricted to games only. Making your site playful help makes even stressful and boring things fun and interesting for users.
Simply put, creating playful interfaces offer the potential to reach out to more users, as those interfaces tend to create playful interaction style that helps in keeping the user engaged.
3. Designing for emotion and flow
When people experience a feeling of enjoyment while browsing your website or an app, they might end up spending hours on the site what might seem a few minutes to them. As a fact, Trevor van Gorp (a user experience designer) stress on creating a “design for emotion and flow” – to create immersive and intriguing user experiences.
Essentially, making a usable product is not enough to keep users satisfied. It is also important that the product is designed in a manner that helps users enjoy a delightful experience.
Also, one of the renowned usability expert ‘Dana Chisnell’ says: good design is not about eradicating frustration, your products must be capable enough to arouse positive emotions and be meaningful to keep users absorbed in the experience.
One great example of designing for emotion and flow is the TripIt app – that helps in managing all of the user’s itineraries.
Conclusion: Does Usability Really Takes a Backseat?
Just like your product design, even usability is crucial for the success of the product. But, whether you need to focus more on creating a good design over a usable one relies on people’s needs. Just remember, despite creating a significant and usable product it won’t help you expand your user base if it lacks meaning. After all, a relevant product helps connect with the audience in a better and more efficient way.
Thus, you must create a design with not just usability in mind but also factors that influence users emotions and behavior. But this does not means that usability takes a backseat, but you need to think beyond designing a usable product and pay due attention to delivering a pleasurable and meaningful user experience as well.
Guest Post By: Ella Cooper works in a leading web development company as a programmer. Apart from programming, she has a penchant for writing and thus she shares her development experience through blogging.