There is a reason you are not familiar with many -maybe not even one- of Airbnb’s competitors. The renting/booking marketplace “giant” has thrived in the global market for a decade and still hasn’t found anyone that can stand up to him.
User-friendly Experience + Simplified Buying Journey = More Sales
Online businesses in 2020 are forced to compete with large online and big box retailers, including Amazon, Wayfair, and brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart and Best Buy. In order to compete, e-commerce websites need to have a great user-experience (UX) and a streamlined buying process. Complicated checkout systems, over-cluttered product pages, and a lack of mobile optimization can severely inhibit a retailer from competing with large companies that have large, dedicated user-experience teams.
We’re all familiar with the way companies such as Uber and Airbnb have brought fundamental disruption to their respective industries. Taxis and cars for hire existed long before the advent of Uber. But one of the core differences Uber offers customers is the user experience (UX).
Many parts of applications are rarely experienced, yet we have to consider how the presence or absence of these states affect a user’s experience. It’s the UX designer’s job to go beyond visual design and make the best experience possible—including all the parts of the experience that nobody thinks to design.
Dashboard design is an art and takes some time to master. The challenge is to communicate analytics in a straightforward way, while allowing users to drill down into the specifics. It is about avoiding clutter, about catering for personalization, and about the prioritization of the right metrics. Dashboard design is a tricky science and to create that one design that is awesome takes some time and talent.
One of the best books I’ve ever read on User Experiences is titled “The Elements of User Experience” written by Jesse James Garrett. In the book, he begins by telling the story of a man who wakes up and wonders why his alarm clock never went off. He goes to make coffee, but struggles with the coffeemaker. On his way to work, he stops for gas, but can’t get his credit card to work and has to stand in a long line to pay. When he is finally on his way, he is detoured due to an accident and arrives far later than he ever anticipated. He ends up irritated, sweaty, and lacking a much needed cup of coffee.
User experience (UX) design focuses on enhancing user satisfaction by improving how we interact with the websites, applications and devices in our lives. In other words, UX makes complex things easy to use.
While the term “UX” is relatively new, the concept of user-friendly design has been around for generations. “Good design is good business,” the second president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, famously told Wharton students in 1973. “We are convinced,” he said, “that good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.”
Hey! This is an excerpt from my book Designing Products People Love, which will be published by O’Reilly in December. Learn more about the book and the 20+ product designers from Facebook, Twitter, Slack, etc. who were interviewed about how they work.
Have you ever experienced a user interface that feels lifeless? Have you created a UI that just seems to be missing…something?
Microsoft, Samsung, GoPro, and others take their best guesses at the next five years of consumer electronics.
When Apple introduced the iPad 2 in 2011, it laid out a noble goal for the future of technology.
“Technology alone is not enough,” an Apple ad proclaimed. “Faster, thinner, lighter, those are all good things, but when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward.”
Up close with the HoloLens, Microsoft’s most intriguing product in years
We just finished a heavily scripted, carefully managed, and completely amazing demonstration of Microsoft’s HoloLens technology. Four demos, actually, each designed to show off a different use case for a headset that projects holograms into real space. We played Minecraft on a coffee table. We had somebody chart out how to fix a light switch right on top of the very thing we were fixing.