factors that influence UX
2025 is a year dedicated to the customer. Businesses are moving away from organizational-centric strategies and thinking more and more about the needs of their customers. But what exactly do customers want?
Customers want their experience with brands and digital assets to be pleasant, simple, and seamless. In other words, they want the usability and the user experience to be easy, intuitive, and if possible, emotionally rewarding. These are seven factors that influence both user experience and usability.
These seven factors influence user experience and usability
This article aims to present the seven factors that influence usability and user experience and how your business can create an experience that contains all seven factors.
factors that influence UX
1. Usefulness
The Internet is fast-paced and consumers don’t like to waste their time with brands and digital assets that don’t help them quickly achieve their goals.
Companies that produce useless content, products, and services will lose customers to businesses that provide intuitive and emotionally positive user experiences. Amazon only provides useful product reviews for their customers.
Users rate the reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Amazon then ranks the reviews based on their helpfulness. This is useful to customers because it avoids any irrelevant information and focuses only on the most relevant and helpful reviews without customers putting in any effort.
Bad Example of Usefulness: Sketch London
Sketch London recently renovated their website and decided to include a dancing egg animation on their homepage. The egg makes a lot of noise and is essentially useless for website visitors.
How Can Your Business Design A Compelling User Experience?
To create a great user experience, start by understanding your audience. Focus on their needs, behaviours, and pain points. You can do this by using comment sections, feedback forms, and user testing to gather insights. Listen to the concerns, questions, and frustrations users share. Then, address these with smart design solutions.
2. Usability
Usability is how well users can achieve their goals with your product, service, website, or app. A good user experience helps people navigate easily, finish tasks quickly, and face fewer obstacles.
Usability is more than just functionality. It involves clear design, a logical layout, and responsive interactions that suit different devices and user needs. Businesses prioritizing usability can reduce frustration, increase customer satisfaction, and improve engagement. This focus can result in higher conversions and lasting user loyalty.
Good Example of Usability: Hardgraft
Hardgraft designed their website effectively and efficiently by creating a product page that is ridiculously easy to navigate.
Their product page is completely image-based and is formatted in a simple grid style. Users simply have to click on an image to learn more.
Example of Bad Usability: Parking Signs in LA
Parking signs in Los Angeles are a great example of bad design. There is a lot of information clustered into one area because in L.A. they have a lot of complex traffic rules. The signs are difficult to read and understand for the user and thus lead to bad usability and a poor user experience.
3. Findability of the User Experience
A findable user experience helps users locate information, products, or services easily. This cuts down frustration. In the digital world, it involves clear navigation, simple searches, and organised content that meets user needs. Websites or apps should be structured for easy access to desired information.
For businesses, findability goes beyond website design. It means ensuring products and content are easily found across platforms, search engines, and social media. A strong presence on the right digital channels allows users to connect with brands where they are active. By optimising content and communication, businesses can improve user experience, boost engagement, and strengthen audience relationships.
Example of good findability: Burberry
Burberry goes beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and includes WeChat and Line in their marketing channels. Burberry communicates through Line and Wechat which are two interfaces widely used in the Asian communities.
This allows Burberry to widen their reach while still expanding their demographic. Burberry also uses Snapchat and Periscope to reach their customers, this automatically places them in an advantageous position for better communication.https://www.youtube.com/embed/G9zvkbKaY-4
How Can Your Business Design A Findable User Experience?
Find out where your customers are spending time and then make it so they can find your brand there.
For example, if your demographic is female millennials then Instagram is the platform for you! Instagram’s main age and gender demographic is female millennials.
4. Credibility
Credibility is key to user experience. It shapes whether consumers trust your brand, products, and services. Without trust, users may not engage with your business or make purchases. Building credibility needs transparency, reliability, and clear communication. This reassures users they are making the right choice.
Many factors boost credibility. These include a professional website design, accurate information, and customer testimonials. A strong brand reputation also plays a part. A trustworthy brand should communicate its values, expertise, and product benefits clearly. Sharing real-life case studies, expert endorsements, and responsive customer support helps strengthen trust.
Example of good credibility: Fit2Fat2Fat
The creator and owner of Fit2Fat2Fat, a weight transformation program, Drew Manning, knows what it’s like to struggle with weight loss. Drew shares his own weight struggle and transformation with pictures and motivational books to relay trust and confidence to his customers on the legitimacy of his programs.
“This is my story of how I plan on going from being obsessed with being fit, to fat in 6 months and how I plan on showing everyone how to get back to fit again in 6 more months.” – Drew Manning
Example of bad credibility: Toyota
Toyota has faced numerous recalls in past years.
According to Edmunds.com, “Over 34 million vehicles in the United States and many million more worldwide are involved in Takata airbag recalls, which have occurred as far back as 2014.” Toyota stumbled in creating a trustworthy product, and therefore made it more difficult to trust their products.
Other Ways for Businesses To Create a Credible User Experience
Include customer testimonials on your website to give your product or service some credibility.
A great way to get unique, fun and creative customer testimonials is to create various contests where past customers send a video of themselves using your product, a short clip of why they love to use it, and why they chose your brand or product.
The most creative video wins a prize, and you get free content for your website!
5. Desirability
Desirability is how much consumers want to use your product or service. It’s more than just functionality. People buy products not only for what they do but also for how they make them feel. A desirable product creates an emotional bond with its users. This bond shapes their view of the brand and affects their buying choices.
Many factors affect desirability. These include design, emotional appeal, branding, company values, and aesthetics. A strong brand identity, engaging storytelling, and a striking visual presence can turn a useful product into one that people seek out. Companies that build desirability don’t just sell products; they sell a lifestyle, an experience, or a sense of belonging.
Good Example of Desirability: Apple
Apple is the poster-child of desire. They’ve designed a brand that has hard-core followers who wouldn’t use a PC if it was offered to them for free. Apple’s sleek, elegant, and expensive design, image, and aesthetics attract people who desire a lifestyle that contains those characteristics.
How Can Your Business Design A Desirable User Experience?
Begin by identifying your target customers. Understand their desires, motivations, and pain points. Research what drives their decisions and what they value in a product or service.
Once you know their needs, design your business around these insights. This includes your product features, branding, company values, messaging, and marketing strategies.
6. Accessible User Experience
An accessible user experience means everyone can easily use and navigate a digital product. This includes people with different abilities, devices, or locations. Accessibility isn’t just about usability; it’s about inclusivity. It ensures that those with disabilities, varying tech, or different levels of digital skills can still connect with your brand. For this reason, it is important to create a digital product that is accessible.
Read the article by B2B International on Creating A Desirable Brand. They interviewed over 40,000 people to find the world’s most desirable brands and what makes them stand out. These brands know that creating engaging, visually attractive, and user-friendly experiences is key.
Example of Good Usability: Beaglecat
Beaglecat is a fantastic example of a website that was designed to have a mobile-friendly user experience. Their mobile website is eye-catching, and doesn’t overwhelm the viewer with information. A few scrolls and viewers can see Beaglecat’s mission, values, and team members.
How Can Your Business Design an Accessible User Experience?
Think about the accessibility of your product or service and usertest and compare both your existing assets, as well as prototype assets (low or high fidelity), and competitors or best practice companies. Frequent and iterative user testing across a range of possibilities allows for constant insights and out of the box user experience design thinking.
7. Valuable User Experience
Value refers to being able to provide a user experience that is enriching to the lives of your consumers.
Good Example of Valuable User Experience: Whisky Exchange
Whisky Exchange adds value to their website by giving detailed descriptions of their whiskies.
Here is an example of the features included on their website that add value for their Nikka From The Barrel Whisky. Their website includes an image so viewers can see what they’ll receive when purchasing a Nikka Whisky.
We learn from their website that Nikka From The Barrel Whisky has black pepper, cinnamon, orange, and smoke characters.
Here we see the details and facts of Nikka From The Barrel Whisky.
Whisky Exchange encourages the consumer to visit their website by providing valuable information that cannot be found elsewhere.
Example of a not valuable experience: PayPal
PayPal uses interactive design irresponsibly.
They got carried away with their receipt animation on Dribble. The receipt takes 3.5 seconds for customers to see their transaction details.
Although it’s cool to see a little animation pop-up during checkout, it doesn’t add any value for the user.
How Can Your Business Design A Valuable User Experience?
Add value by implementing the following things:
- Being An Authority: Writing blogs that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in your field will give your brand authority. This is valuable in the minds of customers who are looking for security from a brand.
- Showing You Understand Your Customers: Open up two-way communication channels with your customers. Try to understand their needs, wants and desires and then show them that you understand.
- Listening to Feedback: Remain active on comment sections, listen to the feedback your customers have, and apply their feedback to your product or service.
factors that influence UX, factors that influence UX
How Can Your Business Design A Compelling User Experience?
The Userlytics remote user testing platform allows you to peek over the shoulders of participants as they interact with your websites and apps, prototypes, and/or competitor assets anywhere in the world, from their home or office.
This state of the art user testing platform provides picture-in-picture videos of user experience test participants in their home as they follow and answer pre-defined tasks and questions; what they see, who they are and what their context is.
The platform is designed for maximum user testing flexibility and scalability; you can assign different tasks and UX research questions as a function of previous responses, thus creating highly advanced user testing test scripts with branching (“skipping”) logic.
By viewing and listening to participants while they attempt to achieve predefined goals using your product or service, and doing so in an iterative “Agile” manner,, you can uncover hidden usability issues and design a compelling user experience.
Userlytics
Since 2009 we have been helping enterprises, governmental organizations, non-profits, agencies and startups optimize their user experience, or UX. With our state-of-the-art platform, massive global participant panel and unlimited accounts/seats for democratizing user research, we are the best all-in-one solution for remote user testing.
Schedule a Free DemoUserlytics Blog. March 26, 2021. The 7 factors that influence user experience. Userlytics
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