Gaining customer/user engagement is not an easy thing in our online world. Sometimes, there’s so much going on around us, with social media and everyday life, we often miss the true essence of how to stand out in the crowd. The same goes for your products, services and blogs. Even if you think you have the next industry magic, now you have to convince the world, your confidence is well placed.
By paying attention to users’ needs and wants, your product or service can become an industry standard, if you have the right professionals working with you to find out about your future clients and customers.
User Experience: A Little History…
Even big companies have had their trial and error moments — think the 80’s New Coke, so you’re not alone…
Making things easy to use for your customers, clients and users is a paramount thing. It’s not always easy to gauge what will catch on and what will fall short. Appealing to a mass is hard but not unachievable. You can build a client base while making your products ‘must haves’ in their world.
Practicing User Experience in the beginning building stages, your digital footprint can become a go-to place for customers. This is also building a brand because it sets you a part of from your competitors.
“Testing early and often is the best way to ensure you’re designing for users and not yourself. We must always remember, we are not the users…”
By utilizing methods like A/B testing, usability testing, conducting interviews, surveys, design thinking and other means, we find out your target market and make personas. This way, we can design specifically for their preferences, making your website a pleasurable experience rather than a frustrating one.
It’s more than just putting content and images together. There’s a bunch of human science under the hood that makes all the moving parts work, seamlessly.
Granger began doing User Experience focus groups while at Pittard Sullivan back in 1998, working on the new TiVo account. In those focus groups, she learned what consumers wanted from the then-new technology — the digital video recorder. From the data and insights received, her team developed the programming screens, which reverberated the new TiVo brand in all their new marketing materials and logo. Following in the footsteps of Apple, the emphasis on users’ expectations and experiences became a forefront in the whole design team’s mind while designing every facet of the TiVo brand.
Since the early 2000s, we have incorporated UX Principles in every website and app we built, using solid research of your users to back up our choices. By doing this, we make solid decisions that pay off in numbers — visitors to your site, buying your products or frequenting your store – online and brick & mortar.
“Good design needs more than just design principles. Today’s designers must embrace user experience in order to propel their careers forward in the digital-based world.”
Currently working in federal government, Granger has continued to utilize these principles to help create stunning yet highly usable cloud-based software and websites for several government agencies.
In addition to her professional work, she is also a member of the federal UX designers groups and contributes to university curriculums offering UX design as a minor/majors. Additionally, she is guest lectures to design students about user experience and research as it is now expected for designers to be versed in these areas as well as design and branding.