What is UX?
Customers come into contact with countless products every day, so it’s all the more important for companies to offer a positive and seamless user experience (UX): it plays a key role in developing products and services, and above all when it comes to customer orientation. Yet what makes a good user experience possible, and what does UX have to do with customer centricity?
What is user experience (UX)?
User experience refers to the way in which users interact with and experience a product or service. It’s all about fulfilling their needs, expectations and requirements while helping them to achieve their goals efficiently and satisfactorily.
Imagine you’re planning a birthday celebration and are looking for the ideal restaurant where you can spend a pleasant and relaxed evening. You’ll probably start by searching for venues on the internet in order to discover whether the premises and opening times meet your needs. If you can’t find any information about a restaurant, or its website isn’t very user-friendly, would you nevertheless try to find more details? Or would you opt for a restaurant whose website is appealingly designed and contains all the relevant information?
Today’s customers are demanding and have high expectations of the products/services they come into contact with. This means it’s important for companies to invest in creating an outstanding user experience and to ensure that it’s constantly improved. Companies that are successful in this respect will be in a position to retain their customers in the longer term and stand out in a highly competitive market.
What makes a good user experience possible?
A positive UX depends on a variety of factors:
- A well-designed user interface, clear navigation, and intuitive opportunities for interaction are seen as important criteria for user-friendliness in the digital sphere. They make it easier to interact with a product or application and ensure a pleasant UX.
- The visual design (including aesthetics, color scheme and typography) helps to improve the user experience and makes a product more attractive.
Viewed overall, UX plays a crucial role for companies that are striving for satisfied and loyal customers. If you want to be user-friendly but don’t know how you’re perceived by potential customers, research methods such as interviews and surveys can provide insights into users’ needs and behaviors; this then enables you to correspondingly adapt designs, products or services.
How UX can improve customer centricity
UX is a good starting point to develop customer centricity in practice. If products/services provide a positive and seamless user experience, companies can gain their customers’ trust and lay the foundation for long-term success. Conversely, a customer-centric organization enables a good UX because it focuses on its customers’ needs, expectations and levels of satisfaction and gears its products/services or even its UX to suit these aspects.
“If you like, the user experience is a vital element of any customer-centered company,” stresses Jan-Erik Baars, LUASA Professor and Managing Partner. “If you can’t deliver that, you might as well forget about customer centricity!” If the way the company functions doesn’t fulfil basic expectations, the customer experience won’t contribute to an improved customer relationship either.
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