Experiences: User Experiences

While you must create products that meet your business goals, you must also ensure that your products address users’ needs. Ascertaining whether a product works for users requires gathering their feedback. Listening to users’ viewpoints helps you better understand their experiences, ultimately providing you an opportunity to take corrective actions to meet their expectations.

Research by Syncly indicates that 40% of the 300 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies they studied were collecting user feedback. These businesses have implemented user-feedback systems to shape their product experiences.

User feedback can help teams create meaningful, easy-to-use designs for Web apps, mobile apps, Web sites, and SaaS products. However, before endeavoring to make gathering user feedback a core part of your product-development process, you should learn about the three major types of user feedback and methods and tools for collecting that data. Read More

The sky over Los Angeles glowed orange as thick smoke rolled through the city. Sirens blared, helicopters circled, and streets emptied as residents scrambled to evacuate. Amidst the chaos, digital tools became a lifeline. Apps such as Watch Duty tracked the wildfires’ progression, air-quality monitors warned of toxic conditions, and cars’ navigation systems helped determine escape routes. But even with this wealth of information, confusion reigned.

I found myself—and everyone around me—cycling between multiple apps, cross-referencing sources, and second-guessing decisions. Some updates contradicted each other. Evacuation notices often arrived too late. Road-closure data lagged behind real-world conditions. This experience underscored a harsh truth: even in the digital age, user experiences for crisis-response remain deeply flawed. Read More

One thing we can count on is that the quantity of information is increasing over time. The prevalence of information, its relationship to knowledge, and its impact on people’s decision-making faculties is becoming a more central concern for UX professionals.

Richard Saul Wurman, the author of Information Anxiety, is a trained architect, a very prolific writer, the founder of the TED conference, and a well-known public speaker. Although he wrote this book 30 years ago, the ideas it presents are just as relevant today as they were then, perhaps more so. It’s a credit to the solidity of his thinking that many of his concepts seem to predict the world in which we live today. Read More