When you’re reviewing your company’s user experience (UX) and the role it plays in your organization, it’s easy to note what needs to change. Poor design, outdated content, poor engagement. But what are things you should look for or look into improving?
In our experience helping companies improve their UX design, we have noticed common threads in what a great user experience should look like.
The first step of defining a good user experience is outlining what your goals are for your organization. Your user experience needs to line up with your overall learning strategy.
Companies will come to Bluewater and say they want their site to look like Netflix. The problem with that is Netflix has its own strategy in mind when it developed its site's user experience. For Netflix, the focus is on content consumption, not learning and talent development. You want your users to spend their time in the LMS learning what they need to do in their current role or for their next role, not getting frustrated trying to find the way to their next activity. If they have a problem they should be able to go to the site, find the solution, and fix the problem in the optimal amount of time.
Once you have your overall strategy, that shapes what the needs are for your organization going forward not necessarily the wants.
The second factor that is important for your user experience is the ease of navigation. The home page plays a critical role in this step. People will decide where to go next based on the content on the home page. It’s essentially the roadmap to the rest of the site. Give people clear and concise options from the beginning. Having clear and concise options, organized logically, with good visual pictures and icons, can reduce the time a user spends looking for where to go.
The third point is to provide your users with feedback. Today in business people want learning paths or ways to see their growth, so they can measure how close they are to achieving their goals. They want to see what they have done and what they need to do to get from point A to point B.
Feedback is also key to improving user engagement with the system because it helps users feel more involved in their careers and progression. In order to do this, you could give users clear paths to go through, progress bars, achievement levels, or badges to help them see their progress.
There are so many other factors that could be mentioned in the conversation about good user experience. The focus should be first and foremost setting the strategy for the organization regarding user experience than optimizing navigation and finally integrating feedback.
The bottom line for UX is very simple. The easier it is for the user to do what they need to do, the better experience they will have.
Want to learn more about improving your UX? Give us a call or message us and let's get started on maximizing your UX.
