User Experience (UX) is the single most critical aspect to have a direct impact on the success or failure of a software product. Although usability or the ease of using a product is part and parcel of software applications, UX consists of a lot of other facets than just the ease of use.
We would try to explain the key aspects that directly influence the user experience of a software application alongside a few crucial technologies that are now critical parts of UX design.
UX Unveiled: Key Aspects and Critical Technologies in Software Design
Usefulness And Usability
First of all, a software app must be useful to the users. That’s the basics of any product concept and design. If your app isn’t useful it cannot stand the competition with other useful apps and solutions. Usefulness of an app can be merely entertainment or fun value or serious uses in practical situations of life. So, from a gaming app to a productivity tool, every app offers a useful solution to a demand.
Usability on the other hand is the aspect that helps users with ease of use and interactions to fulfill their objective of using a product. If a game app requires controlling the gaming actions with 3 buttons simultaneously, it is unlikely to enjoy any traction with the players because two hands are not enough to deal with 3 simultaneous interactions.
Every app product needs to be usable to achieve any degree of success in the market. Generally, the first generation of an app has poor usability score. When you hire prototyping UX designers, many of the future pain points can easily be avoided without waiting for the next updates.
Intelligent and Intuitive User Experience
Artificial Intelligence has come with an era-defining impact for the user experience. One AI-driven solution that took the app world and digital universe by storm simply because of the sophisticated user experience is the conversational chatbot. Intelligent AI-powered chatbots have now become tremendously powerful in carrying out meaningful conversations with users.
As all the trends indicate, chatbots and AI-powered apps are going to rise in popularity and AI-powered user interactions will be the new normal for the sophisticated user experience. As their popularity grows, AI solutions are likely to reach critical mass to outperform and outnumber all existing user interfaces.
Thanks to the embedded AI in the apps, decision making based upon intelligent automation becomes easier than ever before. AI is increasingly facilitating anticipatory and productive design to address specific user pain points when using an app solution.
Read more: Glassmorphism: The New UI Design Trend Setter In 2021 And Beyond
Seamless Interactions Through Voice and Gesture
If you look at the recent user interface and user experience trends in recent years, the rise of voice search, voice interactions, and voice assistants won’t escape your eyes. Any leading mobile app design company in India can give testimony to the increasing popularity of Voice UI. It allows users to get away with their tasks in the easiest and most effortless manner. The voice interactions are likely to hold a significant portion of the future of user experience design.
Human-centric user experience design is increasingly getting the norm of the app world. The Project Soli that is focused on allowing responsive interactions just by following the movement of the hands of the user, is the latest example of where human-centric design is heading for.
Simple user gestures can be detected by using radar that easily deals with the hands of the user as the interface turns the user gestures as the input. This human-centric design based upon gesture tracking can completely transform the user experience across multiple digital platforms and solutions ranging from the Internet of Things to intelligent car systems to wearable products and apps. Thanks to this the friction between user input and the app interfaces can be minimised.
Credibility of the User Experience
Today’s customers simply because of the huge number of choices for every purchase cannot be fooled repeatedly and since the digital interfaces allow spreading the news at lightning speed, a customer sharing his experience can actually ruin the brand’s image. This is why the credibility of the user experience remains really important for the success and failure of an app.
Can your user trust your product from the experience they have? This precisely refers to the credibility of your app. If an app looks and feels credible to the user, thus can easily lead to in-app purchases or transactions. So, establishing credibility with a user experience is also important to ensure business conversion.
Discoverable and Accessible User Experience
One of the crucial aspects of the user experience is discoverability. An app must be easy to find and within the app, the contents and features should also be easily discoverable. On the one hand, the easy discoverability of an app helps with more user acquisition and on the other hand, the in-app discoverability of features and content serves users better and helps convert more business.
In the case of mobile apps and digital interfaces, it is the navigation that helps with the discoverability of what users need and what users are looking for. To help users easily find what they need it is important to create an engaging menu, offer a search function with custom filters, and shape an interface with the least distractions.
While we discuss all facets and trends of app user experience, the question of accessibility or delivering consistent user experience irrespective of different capabilities deserves to get equal importance. Accessibility means helping users with different levels of disabilities and abilities to use the app. For example, your app must allow people with hearing or vision impairment to use the app with interactions that they can exclusively find helpful.
If you think the design for accessibility is a waste of investment with the popular notion that people suffering from disabilities only constitute a small portion of the population, you are terribly wrong. Actually, according to the latest statistics, the United States alone has a minimum 19% of the population having at least one type of disability.
According to most estimates, this figure is quite higher in countries with lower development index. This nearly translates into one among every five users or 20% of the population. This is a huge market that no app developer can afford to miss.
Apart from these numbers, it is also worth considering that when you design for optimum accessibility, you end up creating app solutions that are easy to use and interact for all users. This is another reason to consider accessibility in design with highest importance.
Lastly, accessible design has now become a legal obligation in many countries and if you fail to oblige by this requirement in your design, you can attract fine or legal proceedings.
Conclusion
In the conclusion we must say that all these aspects that are instrumental to deliver a great user experience create the actual value of the app. It is this value that helps your app stand out from competition.
