How User-Centered Design Reduces Errors and Improves Product Development
Eighty-eight percent of internet users are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. Similarly, as much as 90% of people who quit using a mobile app did so because the app performed poorly for them. Statistics like these suggest that figuring out how to reduce errors with user-centered design (UCD) should be a big priority for most companies.
Businesses that embrace this user-centric design philosophy can expect to receive numerous benefits for doing so. This is a list that includes reducing their software’s errors, making it more user-friendly, and lessening the amount of friction between their customers and their goals.
This article discusses real-life examples to show you how to reduce errors with user-centered design. We will also highlight how doing so will help you reach your business goals. Read on to learn more.
Reducing Design Errors Benefits Everyone
The goal of UCD philosophy is to reduce design errors that cost time and money. Achieving this is beneficial to both end-users and companies.
End Users
The UCD approach benefits your end users by empowering the businesses to create products that more closely align with their needs. When a product is built around the user’s expectations, it becomes much easier for them to adopt it.
Additionally, when a design team follows UCD principles, it avoids common pitfalls that can delay a project and prevent productivity. These include things like miscommunication, incomplete planning, and failing to build towards the main goal of the project.
Companies
Businesses that use solid user experience (UX) design principles tend to get a better ROI on the product(s) they build. This is because a poor user interface (UI) will always need a redesign sooner or later, which is a process that costs time and money. And, if those redesigns exceed the budget of the project, it could turn from a success to a failure very quickly.
The bottom line? When companies use UCD principles, customers get more effective products with fewer costs and delays.
Avoid Unnecessary Risks
Companies that don’t think about how to reduce errors with user-centered design put themselves at a competitive disadvantage. By not solving their customers’ problems effectively or having products that are difficult to use, they risk losing customers to competitors who do. Thus, these companies risk losing business, stagnating their growth, and even losing funding from their investors.
Companies also risk losing talent if it doesn’t consider user experience when designing internal applications. Skilled employees will grow frustrated with poorly designed software quickly — especially if they use it daily. If the problem never gets fixed, it could prompt your best people to look elsewhere for a better working experience.
Daito’s User-Centered Approach
An inherent outcome of UCD is the reduction of potential user errors as well as the sometimes more apparent technical errors. You may think of reducing errors as being solely related to technical issues, but users can make frustrating knowledge-based errors thanks to insufficient content organization and quality.
Remove Decision-making Friction
We recently began working with a credit union that was looking to redesign its website. With a deep understanding of what their customers' needs were, they wanted to provide them with better financial solutions.
By digging into the site analytics and conducting user research with contextual inquiries, we were able to focus our efforts. It was important to understand how their customers interacted with the site and what items were important in their decision-making process.
After creating customer journey maps it became apparent that critical paths for the customer to purchase were missing. One, in particular, was the rates page. Though customers were understandably interested in rates, they found the rate page hard to read. Additionally, there was no way to directly purchase or apply from the rates page. This key touchpoint was causing confusion and dropoff.
With another round of interviews, prototype testing, and analysis, we redesigned the rates page (along with the company's website, information, architecture, and content strategy) with a completely user-centric approach. The result was a more intuitive suite of offerings that were easier for customers to understand and better supported both their decision-making process and path to purchase.
The results we produced speak for themselves:
Increase Transparency and Communication
The website redesign and analysis extended to our client’s internal application processing software. During our discovery and research we found several under-the-radar problems that we identified could have a significant impact on efficiency if resolved.
Here are just a few examples of how to reduce errors with user-centered design and make better products by listening to users’ requests and taking action:
Effectively communicating eligibility to customers
Transparency about product fees, terms, and conditions
Clarifying field labels for ease of use
Supplemental explainer content (in-line and via tooltips)
Intuitive in-line validation and error handling
These all reduce user errors which also reduces frustration while filling out an application form (not to mention cleaner data for your company). The net result is customers who are more likely to successfully complete application forms and thus, deliver more revenue.
How Daito Helps
User-centered design is a core part of how Daito helps companies reach their goals with superior products. We solicit feedback from end-users at each stage of the design process to create products that help our clients stand apart from the competition. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.