Ten Most Common User Experience errors made by startup teams

Fortunately, some practical guidelines can help us move in the right direction. In this article, we will take a look at the mistakes that startup teams may make in creating product experiences and how to avoid these problems.

Why should the startup team pay special attention to user experience?

A good user experience can increase user satisfaction, improve product quality and image temperament, and further promote your business development. If you have a product that is acceptable to many people, the marketing work will be much easier.

In addition, products with good experience can greatly reduce customer service costs and help your team or company establish positive public relations, lay a solid foundation for future business development.

Otherwise, poor user experience will have a huge negative impact on the startup team and products. Bad news will spread like wild fire. If users are unhappy, they will spread negative word of mouth. In severe cases, your product will be hard to turn over.

I like Dharmesh Shan, a startup guru. "Don't try to favor users. What's important is to create happy users through products ."

From the very beginning, it was much easier to establish a positive image for the product in the user's mind through a good experience than to make the user less satisfied, and then try to change the face. A good user experience is by no means defined by a large investment or a large-scale customer service team. It is a concept centered around the product cycle from beginning to end. It is an attitude and culture.

UX (User Experience) and customer experience

A smart team always places the customer's value at the core, and uses a complete set of experience policies to thoroughly explore the customer's value. This strategy covers user experience, brand, and marketing, and aims to create a comprehensive and unique experience model for customers. (Related reading: Differences in iOS user experience and strategies)

In the past, many companies focusing on offline businesses mistakenly thought that even if their websites are not so easy to use, there would not be much problem. After all, offline is the focus. Today, this concept is hard to stand up, because every point of contact between users and the company is related to the overall customer experience. In this competitive market environment, many new players will be wide-eyed and looking for opportunities to make breakthroughs in areas where user experience has not yet been truly done.

Products that provide unique customer experience are usually excellent and can surprise people. We can think of big companies such as Ocado, Apple, Innocent Drinks, and startups such as moo.com (providing online printing services) and graze.com. They share a common feature, that is, the love and passion for their own products and the ability to grasp the value of core customers.

Next we will go to the topic to see the typical errors that the startup team may make in terms of product experience.

1. Good experience and incorrect Products

The right product should have the characteristics of simplicity, focus, and business model. Many websites and mobile apps have beautiful interfaces and outstanding interaction modes, but when you are interested and have a deep understanding of them, they will find that they do not bring obvious value to users. The problem is that either the product is not oriented to a popular demand, or the solution it provides has problems. To create an excellent user experience, we must first ensure that the product orientation is correct before the specific design work is carried out.

2. The UX work is too late and execution is slow.

User experience design, including user research and competitive product analysis, should be followed up in the initial stage of the product, which will help to explore the product direction and explore product concepts. In addition, early product prototypes and availability tests can also help us discover potential problems in product features and Interaction Models as early as possible, reducing the risk of re-designing or re-engineering in the future. (Related reading: Early prototype design and user testing)

This article tries to use the "Lean User Experience" thinking method to build a minimal product function based on the user's needs and usage situations and focus on the core use cases, so as to maintain iteration and move forward quickly. This will help start-up teams enter the market at the lowest cost and the highest speed.

3. Lack of clear value propositions

To establish a healthy and persistent relationship between products and users, we must first initiate a "conversation" with users in the correct way from the product perspective ". If they cannot effectively attract users' attention within a few seconds and let them know important information, they are likely to be unable to truly convert to customers. Creating simple and clear value propositions is not an easy task. However, once you have done so, it can help you present the core elements of the product to users in the shortest time, let users know the differences between your products and similar applications in the market.

When writing the value proposition text, try to think about what value they can get from your product and what target task they can accomplish from the user's perspective. The purpose of value proposition is to allow users to create concepts for your products in the shortest time and want to continue to understand them. Therefore, you should try to keep the text short and easy to read.

4. Lack of focus

A misunderstanding that the startup team can easily get into is that they want to do too many things in a short period of time. Specifically, they want to create too many product functions too much. Try to focus on one or more points, which will help to reflect the core value of the product and make it easier to communicate and interact with the target user. A large and comprehensive product may not meet the needs of any user group.

Taking an application like Dropbox (file storage and sharing) and Instagram (photo sharing) as an example, their success is inseparable from their focus, that is, they can achieve the ultimate in one thing. This is never so simple as it sounds. In many cases, we need to face external factors, such as user voices, "Suggestions" from investors or internal decision makers. Sometimes we must understand "no" and learn the necessary communication skills to support and recognize our design decisions.

5. availability test missing

Even if there is a shortage of time and labor costs, the importance of usability testing for products cannot be ignored by the startup team. Indeed, surveys, focus groups, user interviews, and other research methods all have their own advantages, but they cannot replace usability testing, an observation that allows users to directly interact with product prototypes, in this process, you are likely to obtain unexpected information from user feedback.

A well-known example of usability testing is "a button worth $0.3 billion ". Once, a large online retailer found that they lost a large number of customers in the payment process, so they invited the availability expert Jared Spool to help with the availability test. Through observation, he found that the user was disgusted with having to register an account before payment; a common complaint was that "I came here to shop, not to build membership relationships ."

Based on this observation, they decided to change the login button in the payment process to "continue", and told users that you can directly shop without having to register, but registration will bring convenience to you. The retailer's sales increased by 45% that night, and that year's sales increased by US $0.3 billion.

Never take it for granted that our products are very useful, because we are too familiar with our products and cannot really objectively judge from the user's perspective.

6. Too many forms

In websites or mobile app products, a form is used to allow the system to obtain user input. This is a very sensitive interaction point. Generally, the lack of well-designed forms will become an important reason for users to abandon this product.

Almost all websites use forms, such as searching, subscription, Transaction Payment, registration and login. You need to be careful about every form and consider whether the interaction methods in the details are reasonable and easy to use. Otherwise, users may feel frustrated or even angry in these links.

Fortunately, the Book Web form design has brought some changes to the world, and more people begin to pay attention to form design.

Adjustments to the details in the form can sometimes bring considerable returns to the website, including an increase in conversion rates. Instead of dropping a single table consisting of more than 20 fields to the user, try to group them according to the logic or operation steps. From the user's perspective, we need to understand what kind of model can make them feel more comfortable. After all, the more fields you use in a form, the more likely they will be unable to complete the form. In general, marketing department members like to ask questions as many questions as they can in the form. The consequence of this method is that the form completion rate is greatly reduced for users.

7. Let developers write text

Think back to your experience using other websites or mobile apps and whether you have ever considered yourself as a dummies, or do you feel that the unfriendly, blunt, and dazzling prompts seem to be yelling at you? In fact, in many cases, the small and scattered Text of the product is "written" by technicians during the development process. This situation is quite puzzling-information text is an important interaction point between products and users, but we allow ourselves to throw it to people who lack professional skills in this field!

As the designer Joshua Porter said: "The text should be simple and powerful. It must be fast, light, and effective. It can be a sentence, a phrase, a word or a word, it is short but influential." With reasonable texts, You can effectively connect products with users. Ensure that the style and tone of the text are consistent in every step of the product. In addition, the use of non-written terms from time to time can also improve users' preference for the product.

8. Lack of emotion and personality

We need to give the product an appropriate personality. For a long time, we have been focusing on functions and availability. Now it is time to consider how to integrate personality into the product experience.

Whether you are creating an online application or a simple display page, you can try emotional design ideas in the design scheme. No matter how funny, friendly, serious, and cautious, as long as the personality of the design solution conforms to the characteristics of the product itself, it can produce a long and profound impression in the user's mind.

Recommended reading: adding personality-Emotional design components and practical cases to products

9. technology becomes an obstacle

Many websites seem to users as a machine, which is sometimes caused by technical factors. To enable technology to serve products, if a technology cannot bring high-quality user experience to products, consider other solutions. It is not because computers (or developers) say "no" to compromise and accept some technical solutions that impede the improvement of product experience. Hard-to-recognize Verification Code images, error prompts full of technical terms, meaningless modal windows, page refresh and redirection-these problems are extremely damaging to the product experience.

10. Online too early or too late

Many startup teams will stay away from the public and spend months or even years keeping themselves in "invisible mode" to avoid launching products under the influence of too many uncertainties, or prevent competitors from stealing ideas. At the same time, some teams will release the first version of the product in the shortest time in a very "Lean" style.

We need to find an appropriate balance between "early launch" and "seeking perfection. This is not an easy task. The trade-off results will depend on the actual situation of different products. In addition, the market competition of similar products is also an important factor. However, the most basic bottom line is not to push the product to the market until it reaches the "minimum availability. Ensure that the core functions are in place, and the user experience around the core functions has been fully considered and crafted (related reading: Minimal Availability design ). If the product is released without reaching this level, you may need to spend a lot of money to make up for the negative impact of the first phase of the product in the following days.