How to improve UX designing with a new product

“User experience design is the science and art of designing a new product so that it’s—easy to use—fits expectations and—meets business goals.”
—Susan Weinschenk, CEO and Chief Behavioural Scientist, The Team W.

What is user experience?

User experience (UX) refers to everything that impacts the customer’s interaction with the digital product. It’s the experience your customers have while purchasing or using your product.

However, ensuring a great UX while designing a new product comes with challenges. The goal should be to implement UX design that offers the best solution to the user’s need at that particular moment.

Characteristics of UX design

While discussing and defining UX design, we should consider the following characteristics:

UX design is different from UI design

UX refers to the overall user experience, while UI refers specifically to the user interface. UI is just an aspect under the vast umbrella of UX.

UX design is more than good usability

After launching a new product, its usability is an indicator of how efficient and effective it has been for people in completing their tasks. Therefore, good usability and good UX design go hand-in-hand.

However, usability is one attribute of good UX. Many other factors have to be considered while establishing the UX design as successful.

UX design is a continuous process

No specific UX design model establishes itself as ‘ideal’. So, when you get feedback from your consumers, you’ll often have to make tweaks. Additionally, UX designing trends plus changes in the product and industry will compel you to adapt and update continuously.

The people run the UX design

For near-perfect UX design, you must dig deeper into user needs, wants, preferences, behaviours, and other factors. UX designers should be able to relate the product to the users and empathise with their needs.

Three UX designing challenges while developing a new product

It is one thing to navigate UX design challenges for a product that has been launched already. Testing the product and receiving feedback is easier with an existing customer base. But this is not the case for designing and developing new products.

So, with that in mind, the key UX challenges faced while creating a new product are:

Designing for unknown users

The biggest challenge while UX designing a new product is that you have no existing users to study. As a result, it becomes difficult to address customers’ actual needs and wants while ensuring that the product doesn’t only help you in meeting your business goals. Therefore, conducting user research is essential.

When conducting this user research, you should:

Trust your gut instincts when deciding on the users of your product.
Create provisional persona profiles of the users you envision using your products. Then, connect these profiles to real people and real situations.
Refine the profiles once you connect with like-minded individuals in real life.
Test usability with real people using an interactive prototype of your product. This guide on usability testing will help you match the user persona you have come up with.
Customer journey maps and mental model diagrams will help you prioritise and place the best features in your UX design.

Translating observations and concepts into tactile solutions

Bridging the gap between abstract and concrete is a real challenge for UX designers. The following skills can turn the abstract into products that sell:

Ask your persona profiles the right questions during interviews. This will help you collect the correct data to inform design.
Translate the results you get from interviews into potential jobs. People look for products and services that can make tasks more manageable. Effective UX designing bridges the gap between where the user is and where they aspire to be.
Build features that users need/want. Features that save time, reduce financial risks, and provide transparency in their work will attract them the most.
The final step is to come out of the descriptions and search results that you have gathered to create concrete digital interface designs. All the features produced should be able to guide every user virtually.

Responsibly managing timelines

Untapped areas make market research and testing tedious. If the process is not planned correctly, good UX designing will take longer than expected. It will also delay other parts of product testing if the process is not prepared perfectly.

How to enhance the user experience for new products?

When launching a new product, tension is always high. To smooth the onboarding process for your new user base, you should:

Take a consultative approach

Not all users will be able to understand the technical information about your product in one go. Some may be beginners. Others might be experts. Therefore, a good UX design should be able to cater to people from different knowledge levels. Experts can jump straight to the cart, but beginners should be provided with basic information.

Set up calls to action

Your design should always come with an appropriate call to action. The CTA often becomes a discerning factor in how you want your potential customers to reach you. In time, the whole UX design can become dependent on (or at least geared towards) the CTA.

Testing, monitoring, and tracking the UX design

There is no harm in testing and monitoring the UX design before spreading it out to a broader audience. You can also use specialist tools to observe users, listen to their experiences, and pay attention to metrics. This information will help you develop better features. (And a better conversion rate over time.)

Being active on social media handles

Companies launching their new products should optimally use social media to maximise coverage and advertisement. Add links to other social media handles and make your website a safe place to interact as a company/brand.

Interviewing users and conducting user surveys

Connecting with your most active users and understanding their level of satisfaction with the product and the UX design will go a long way. Qualitative feedback is as important as quantitative feedback. On the other hand, customer surveys help understand the needs of newer users.

TL;DR: New product UX designing

The success of your new product is very much dependent on its UX design. And putting your customers’ needs at the core of your UX designing process, learning about their expectations, and delivering more than they have asked for will deliver loyal users.

Author bio:

B Naomi Grace is a passionate content writer with over two years of experience writing for different niches. Writing content and knowing that it will help someone is what keeps her driven on this journey. She likes to read, groove to her favourite songs, and mentally plan her next escapade in her spare time.