How to Improve The UX of Your Product

Congratulations, you're taking the first step to creating a more relevant product that's higher quality and more useful and beautiful to use. In this article we'll share how you can improve the UX/UI or your product overall. But first:

Why should you improve the UX of your product

• Reduce churn rate - when you're more user-centred, your features are more relevant and vital to someone's workflow
• Increase product and feature adoption - things that are too hard to use, simply aren't used
• Make your product more “sticky” - when you have a greater understanding of workflow, you identify and target opportunities for "stickiness"
• Spend less time re-doing features - following gut feel is expensive when users don't use what you built
• Prevent UX bugs that turn into blockers - reduce support efforts that shouldn't be there in the first place
• Become more competitive - find market signals through user interaction

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Involve users

Getting users involved is an invaluable practice, that benefits the quality and relevance of your product faster than you might think. And no, I’m not talking about Jerry, your work buddy a few desks over, but actual real users that represent your target market.

User interviews are an important part of the UX design process. By speaking with current or potential users about a product or topic, you’ll better understand user needs, motivations, pain points, and workflows. These insights can spark new perspectives, challenge your assumptions, and validate your good ideas.  

The hardest part of involving users is usually that first attempt at recruiting people, especially if the UX culture around you is really green. Involving users might feel like a big change for teams, and it’s normal to feel bit fearful about getting feedback at first. It could take time and energy to operationally make this happen, and to put the right incentives in place.

Adopting a user-centered mindset requires a slight shift in the way you think and the way things are done. At a high level, you’ll be ahead of the game if you can establish relationships with users who are available to interview and run usability tests with (or even more informal feedback sessions on early concepts). This could set you apart from your competitors, who might be spending thousands of dollars implementing features that are irrelevant and hard to use.

We've helped companies (through our UX service practice) who's customers are fortune 500 companies, seemingly impenetrable fortresses of NDAs and bureaucrazy, so we can say with certainty that any user group can be accessed and recruited for user testing. This is something that seems a lot scarier than it actually is, we promise!

Reduce loading time

If you want your user experiences to even stand a chance at being ‘good’, ten loading time is a key requirement. Imagine an interface where you’d have to wait three seconds every time you click on something it’d be impossible to use—the system isn’t going nearly as fast as your brain. Womp womp x 10.

Fixing loading or performance issues requires a lot of development tricks and effort. But there are a few situations where it’s not even worth trying. In the enterprise software world, long loading times can be unavoidable, especially when these complex products run intense processes on ginormous amounts of data. At that point, it’s more about giving appropriate loading feedback than it is about preventing loading time altogether. And that’s okay! As long as your system is telling people what’s up, they won’t think it’s broken.

🏅 Pro tip: Integrate loading time into your non-functional requirements. Create a system for what’s being loaded and the amount of time it takes. As a team, define what’s acceptable and what’s not for your product.

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Rethink UX copy

If your goal is to make a clearer and more cohesive UX/UI in your product, copy can be one of the fastest ways to make that happen and bonus, no one with specialized visual design skill is required. Here's where to focus those copy eyeballs when making improvements:

Navigation: At the root of any smooth navigation experience is clear copy. Copy refers to the words used on your screen, and words matter. Much like the significance of words in a face-to-face conversation, the same principle applies to digital experiences. Nailing the copy isn’t easy—it requires serious effort.

Workflows: UX copy is especially crucial for experiences that involve heavy step-by-step interactions, like onboarding, filling out forms, or really any time you click a button.

Buttons and interactive elements: Many under-designed products are chock-full of confusing word choices. Take, for example, a product that uses three different words—remove, delete, and archive—for the same action. This inconsistency degrades the user experience, leaving users confused and skeptical. Users might wonder: “If this product doesn’t differentiate between these words, what else are they missing?”  

While you're considering copy, don't forget to examine your error message UX as well. It's usually an intensive process to audit and correct all of those spots. Remember we're here to help you out if you run out of steam.

Maintain general consistency

Consistency can come in the form of visual design, behaviour, information architecture, or logic in your system. It might sound a bit abstract, but let’s paint a picture: Imagine you’re trying to send an e-transfer. As you go through the process, the screens change colour, each form field acts differently to tell you what’s required, and most buttons say “next,” but one of them says “proceed” right in the middle.

Another example might be more subtle. Say in your "upload data" workflow, you have to press a button to save, but it's the only workflow you need to do this with, this inconsistent logic will inevitably lead to user errors which, in enterprise software tends to be high stakes and creates an awful user experience, where people get legitimately upset and frustrated.

A word of wisdom ☝️👵
Audit your software for consistency differences. Map out the journey from screen to screen in your main flows, note any wonky behaviours or UI elements that could be changed, and prioritize them as a team.

Hire real UX experts

Most teams out there either have a single overworked designer or no designer at all. This means the responsibility of design is often foisted upon a product manager or the developers with an "eye". Though it may seem cost effective at first, the expensive consequences of a bad user experience undermining revenue growth or traction in the market pales in comparison to the cost of a great UX resource. You also may have reached the limit of what your team can achieve design wise.

The issue is how exactly to find the right UX resources who can act efficiently and perform to the level your product needs. For software that requires some incremental improvement, hiring a full-time designer can be the way forward. For products that need to make big improvements or usher in new products quickly to the market, a specialized team of UX experts may be a better option. Pencil and Paper specializes in the art of learning complex subject matter while designing great new user experiences at the same time. Explore our services pages: AI products, Dashboards, FinTech and Biotechnology.

Prevent loss of work and time

If you want to deliver a great UX, sometimes you just need to not deliver a bad UX (at least to start off). If users waste their precious time and effort, it’s a major disadvantage for your product and brand.

We’ve all filled out a long form, only to LOSE THE WHOLE THING. It’s not just upsetting; it can send users away, taking your potential revenue with them.

Consider the scale of importance here directly related to the level of investment users put in. If you fill out a form with your personal details and lose that, it sucks, but you’ll probably get over it soon enough. However, if you have to gather multiple files to upload and add numbers from your tax forms, now that’s way more difficult and stressful.

When working on digital products, your main focus should be on preventing users from losing their precious time. The best products out there avoid these major UX-tastrophies.

Pro tip: Apply this concept when prioritizing your backlog: the more users lose, the more important the fix or feature.

Optimize for efficiency

On the flip side of ‘avoiding a bad user experience’, we have the potential to boost ease of use by filling in the gaps for people. This is where thoughtful defaults come into play. They are a hard nut to crack, and may not seem like typical “design,” but well-done defaults are a crucial part of the user experience (and absolutely a design choice).

Take this real-life example: Once upon a time, we were working on an early-stage fintech product. In one form, people had to declare their criminal record. The first field in the form was “Name of crime convicted” and the default selection (before we sounded the alarm) was “assault”. This is exactly the kind of detail you want to pay attention to, so you don’t accidentally accuse your users of committing a pretty serious crime. #thatwasacloseone

But back to defaults and efficiency. The more you can usher people along, filling in the likely defaults along the way, the better your product will be—especially when there’s a lot of work to be done in your product. Just be cautious when it comes to selections that are of a more sensitive or high-stakes nature.

Efficiency examples in software:

• Templates with specific settings already applied for easier setup
• Scripts or boolean logic features - where users can apply specific logic to cut down on repetition
• Multi-select actions - where many items can be selected and acted upon at once
• AI-enabled shortcuts - where users can reduce tedious tasks in a smart way (see our AI services page if you need help designing this)
• Many more - there are so many optimizations at key moments that can be done!

Pro tip: Humans only have so much mental energy, so ask yourself: Is this field or decision someone has to make worth their energy? Or can we have a default in place to help them fast forward?

Follow a clear visual design and visual hierarchy

Your user interface’s (UI) appearance is a game-changer: it can make your product appealing, or, in the worst case, confusing. Visual design involves expertise in arranging elements so that they function seamlessly in a UI. You’ll want to learn how to align elements on your page, build a type scale, build a UI colour palette, and the basics of visual hierarchy.

This is often a spot where the skillset of the development team meets its limit. Many product teams try to wing it and improve the visual part of the software but find themselves at a loss, because they are skilled in fundamentally other areas. Visual design prowess is a very specific skillset, where even if you can see that something is wrong, it's much harder to meaningfully fix it once you've identified the problem.

🛟🆘🛟 Sick of trying to wing it? Explore our UX services page - we do the full "stack" of UX/UI design across many situations for companies in the world's most complex domains. We're here to save the world from bad UX.

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Ensure high-quality UI interactions

Think of interactions as how the interface reacts to what you’re doing, and what it communicates back—it’s essentially UX feedback. At a super high level, each step a user goes through needs to be played out in the user interface through interactions. It’s the action <> reaction of the experience.

To complete a task, users need to know if the action exists in the first place, how to do it (e.g. fill out a form), and how to complete it (click save). Then to finalize things, they need to know whether the system is loading and if the task was completed successfully, or if errors occurred (and how to fix them).

High-quality interactions are especially important in the world of enterprise products, as people use these products every day at work. Good design affects workers’ efficiency and reduces the chance of critical errors.

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Find out what UX level you're at

The first step to improving is having some insight to where you need to improve. Lots of teams have trouble understanding just where their product can improve and where they are already doing a good job. Many enterprise products may be hosted on premise or don't allow usage analytics to be derived, so product managers are having to make key roadmap decisions, based on very limited or anecdotal information. Often teams have a real desire to improve the user experience and create the best product they can, but due to a lot of tech and design debt, they find themselves very unsure of how to proceed forward. You might be asking yourself if you need a UX Audit.

This situation is exactly why we created our UX Audit Service - which gives you a full breakdown of the severity and nature of your UX issues and derives concrete next steps you can take to start improving your UX within the next sprint.

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Wrapping up

Trying to design your product with little or no design resources is a losing battle that many software companies (especially in this economy), can't afford. Waiting for the dev team to slowly level up and incrementally improve while trying to counteract the inconsistency and UX weirdness that's introduced release after release is a feat that doesn't make business sense in the long term.

If you're a leader on a product, you may ask yourself: "How long can we get away with a subpar UX?" and for many of us in competitive verticals, the question changes to "Can I afford not to have a great UX, given what competitors are doing?". Product teams often wonder how they can match the CEO's vision for an amazing product to the resources and skills that exist in house - many teams are at their limit in terms of trying to design themselves.