Top

May 22, 2023 Edition

Balancing AI with Human Authority and Empowerment

Enterprise UX

Designing experiences for people at work

A column by Jonathan Walter
May 22, 2023

If it were physically possible to throw a ball at the Internet, your throw wouldn’t have to be very accurate to strike some article, blog post, or social-media blurb about artificial intelligence (AI). It seems that AI is on every leader’s mind at every technology company—taking the business world by storm—and the general public has been all too happy to follow suit. There’s a new gold rush at hand, with the spoils going to the companies, startups, and enterprising individuals who find ways to best leverage the capabilities of this new technology.

But is AI all that advantageous—or ready to become so? As a UX professional working in the industrial-automation domain, I want to share some perspectives in this column that might be surprising to you. Most importantly, we must endeavor now, more than ever, to balance human authority and empowerment with the automated and artificial solutions that we’ll create and likely champion going forward. In this article, I’ll delve into the following:

  • embracing narrower applications of AI
  • exercising patience and prudence regarding bigger AI applications
  • understanding what UX professionals can do to contribute to the future of AI  Read More

Champion Advertisement
Continue Reading…

Visual-Design Principles and UX Design Best Practices

May 22, 2023

Visual designers design and implement the aesthetics of a product, application, or Web site, including its use of images, colors, and fonts. How designers place visual elements on a page to create an overall look and feel is crucial to delivering an effective, attractive design.

In this article, I’ll share some visual-design principles that play a significant role in UX design, including scale, balance, contrast, color, hierarchy, dominance, and Gestalt principles. I’ll also explain why each principle is essential to achieving a well-balanced, functional design that supports a great UX experience. Read More


6 Ways UX Design Builds Stronger Customer Relationships

May 22, 2023

Whether you’re designing a physical or a digital product or an end-to-end customer journey, a positive user experience is crucial to business success. UX design ensures that you’re solving the right problem and design an optimal solution, keeping users’ behaviors and desires in mind. The aim of UX design is to provide a seamless, efficient, delightful user experience. A product that is user centric has a higher engagement rate because users are more likely to enjoy using it and to be more satisfied with their experience.

UX design considers the entire product lifecycle. UX design’s concerns and activities include discovery, research, user-interface design, usability, data analysis, and more. The benefits of UX design can also go beyond the product itself to impact the business as a whole. According to Nielsen Norman Group:

“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

By emphasizing UX design details throughout the entire end-to-end customer journey, you can provide a cohesive, streamlined user experience that helps your company build strong relationships with your customers. Read More


The Business Case for Investing in UX Design for Your Mobile App

May 22, 2023

Mobile app design services and in-house UX designers can help businesses create user-friendly, engaging apps. Expert UX designers can use their skills and creativity to craft visually appealing, easy-to-use interfaces that enhance the user experience. Whether you’re creating a new app from scratch or working to improve an existing app, investing in UX design can help you achieve your goals.

In today’s digital era, business success often depends increasingly on customers’ adoption of mobile apps. In a world where over 3.8 billion people use smartphones, businesses must make their mobile apps as user friendly as possible. The goal of any company developing a mobile app should be to create a product that is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.

This requires careful attention to UX design and, more specifically, user-interface (UI) design. Consider the potential returns on your business’s investment in your mobile app’s user interface and UX design. The benefits could include a rise in user engagement, higher revenues, and greater customer satisfaction. Read More


10 Ways to Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rates

May 22, 2023

Do you spend the majority of your time and energy embellishing the design of a particular landing page? Have you been pouring money into email-marketing campaigns and pay-per-click (PPC) ads that lead to poor conversions? This can lead to wasted efforts.

Getting a lot of traffic through a Web site’s marketing landing pages doesn’t necessarily make them deliver leads. In fact, for marketers, good landing-page conversion rates can be more annoying than poor landing-page conversion rates, especially when it’s challenging to ascertain the root cause of their success.

Most marketers get conversion rates of 10% or less. Moreover, the average conversion rate is 26%, which is more than adequate! But you won’t have to endure the pain of poor landing page-conversion rates forever if you follow the top ten ways of increasing landing-page conversion rates that I’ll share in this article. Read More

May 08, 2023 Edition

UX Professionals Are People, Too: The Practice of Self-Empathy

May 8, 2023

As we move through 2023, we can easily compare how the world looks today with what it looked like three years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic. Fortunately, lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are now things of the past. Vaccines and booster shots are widely available and are generally preventing serious illness from Covid-19. Restaurants, stores, other businesses, and office buildings have reopened, and many of the emergency measures that the government enacted during the pandemic have lifted.

But even as we resume our activities from the before times, our feelings about our world might not so easily return to normal. Everything in our lives somehow seems more complicated now. While we might welcome having the options of dining out or seeing a film in a theater, we also might be feeling uneasy about the economy, politics, or worrying about escalating global conflicts.

Caring about people is a core part of any UX or usability professional’s job. But our capacity for empathy is not infinite. Plus, our ability to replenish our energy when we encounter adversity or uncertainty in our lives might look somewhat different today than it did before. Read More


5 Ways Augmented Reality Can Increase Ecommerce Sales

May 8, 2023

Ultimately, the success of an ecommerce business depends primarily on its ability to attract and retain customers. One way to attract and retain customers consistently is to provide a great customer experience. In recent years, augmented reality (AR) has emerged as a powerful tool for achieving this goal.

AR can help boost ecommerce sales by offering innovative ways of providing customers with extensive product information. Customers are more likely to purchase when they have an in-depth understanding of a product. According to research, creating AR experiences for products can increase conversion rates by up to 94%.

In this article, I’ll explore five ways in which AR can increase ecommerce sales and transform the ways in which customers shop online. Read More


Pay Attention to Web Performance Metrics to Improve the UX

May 8, 2023

Advances in technology and increases in the numbers of online users have made business owners aware of the importance of providing a seamless user experience for their customers.

One crucial aspect of such an online user experience is Web performance, which can have a significant impact on user engagement and conversion rates. Thus, in the world of UX design, it is important to pay attention to Web performance metrics. They provide a crucial indicator that helps you to ensure that users

  • engage with a Web site
  • stay on a Web site for longer periods of time
  • convert into new customers

In this article, I’ll explore the importance of Web-site performance metrics in UX design and describe how you can use them to improve the overall user experience of a Web site. Read More


A Complete Guide to Usability Testing

May 8, 2023

I headed an education company for ten years. When my line of yoga and mindfulness products launched in 2015, I recognized the need to test the products with actual customers, but struggled to conduct user research in a meaningful or consistent way.

The products were downloadable, printable educational materials such as illustrated yoga cards, activity sheets, and teacher’s manuals. Although that format was popular when we had begun R&D, it had become less ideal as technology evolved and customer expectations shifted. Our users had to print and, in some cases, even cut out the printed materials. Sometimes they laminated them, too. It was obvious these extra steps were creating barriers to conversion and retention.

My desire to learn more about technology led me to shift the focus of my career to software as a service (SaaS), user research, and UX design. When I first learned about usability testing, a light bulb went off in my head regarding my experience creating my product line. But hindsight can be costly. Read More


Improving Web-Site Conversion Rates Through Better UX Design

May 8, 2023

UX design is the basis of every Web site and is the process of increasing users’ pleasure by improving a Web site’s usability, efficiency, and accessibility. Furthermore, a Web site’s conversion rates derive directly from its UX design.

A Web site’s users require more time and patience to figure out a complicated design. As a result, UX design is an important consideration when you’re creating a Web site for which a key goal is delivering higher conversion rates. Let’s consider some data that demonstrates the importance of a Web site’s UX design, as follows:

  • According to studies, making a first impression on someone takes only 0.1 second, but it takes much less time for the visitors of a Web site to form an opinion about a Web site—just 0.05 seconds. 
  • Regardless of whether users decide to utilize a Web site, they’ll rely primarily on the opinion they form about a Web site in the first 50 milliseconds.
  • According to Chartbeat statistics, users spend 66% of their time below the fold. ClickTale reported similar findings and discovered that users used the scroll bars on 76% of all Web pages.
  • Enhancing a Web site’s user experience can increase leads and purchases and create brand evangelists.

In this article, I’ll discuss six design tips for improving a Web site’s user experience to increase its conversion rates through better UX design. Read More