If you have a hard time finding what you’re looking for on the website, it influences the way you feel about the brand behind it. That’s why even small businesses have to think about UX. There are startups that care deeply about delivering great experience to customers, but don’t know where to begin, and lack the resources to hire an expert to help tackle the problem. Here are some tools for the DIY entrepreneur in you to get you started with UX design:
- Design first, build later: Develop user personas to get a perspective of users. This will help you when you design each level of your website UX.
- Research: Don’t assume that you are the target user. Instead reach out to family, acquaintances and friends and interview them. If you take the time to thoroughly understand a problem people are having, you can design a solution for them.
- After analyzing information from your interviews, revist your problem statement and assumptions. You’ll see that there is a possible solution and the assumptions would have changed.
- When ideating, don’t criticize or edit. Let ideas flow. You’ll have time to prioritize and refine later. When brainstorming ideas, think about the outcomes users want to achieve.
- It’s time to prioritize those ideas down to an essential set, or Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
- Now create. We create design artifacts to learn and iterate to make them better. They are by nature disposable. Because of that, we don’t want to invest too much time creating them.
- Verify. When you create any design artifact, such as a storyboard, flowchart, set of wireframes, or prototype — you do it to test an idea or assumption and learn from it. You verify it works for users or not. You build things to test them, learn from observations, and iterate the design. This is expressed by the Lean UX cycle: Think > Make > Check
- The logical next step is to go beyond asking your customers general questions, and sit them in front of a computer and do usability testing.
- Do A/B testing: A/B testing lets you see how people respond to different versions of the design you’re considering.