Latest Articles on Ux by Our Team

We’ve recently run usability studies on an application for a financial product where, after a user inputs a couple of screens worth of data, a tailored product solution appears. We had a nice prototype, and all was well except for one thing…

During the usability study, we received the following feedback: the recommendation arrived too fast. Wait, what? Yes, the results arrived too quickly after the user hit send, which made people think that it wasn’t real. Some of the user feedback was “there’s no way it could’ve looked at my data in such short amount of time…”, “I don’t think this is real, because it hasn’t spent any time thinking about it…”, “I wouldn’t trust this product, it made me fill in screens of data but then ignored it all when giving me the recommendation…”, or, in some cases, people were expecting to continue filling in more data and didn’t entirely believe that the screen they were looking at was the solution and not just another screen requiring more information.

Dashboards are often the backbone of a good web app as they can be used to present large amounts of data in a condensed and visual form. In general, the more complex the app is, the more it can benefit from a well-structured, clear dashboard that helps users understand at a glance what the system and the underlying data is doing. We all use dashboards in our day-to-day lives, from the dashboard in our cars to the display on the thermostat that controls our air conditioner. In this case, I prefer to focus on the web ones.

So, how can we, as designers and developers, make sure that our web app dashboard is efficient?

It’s a relatively new discipline and, even though the definitions and standardised methods have been around for decades, everyone tends to interpret it their own way. Some have dedicated UX people and some have entire teams working on it. Others use UX and UI interchangeably to refer to “everything on the user side”. This is why it's always a good idea to clarify what exactly you get during a UX engagement, and based on that, decide whether you need it or not.

Here, at reinteractive I am the Lead UX specialist and work with our customers directly to work out their app’s requirements. My role, in a nutshell, is reconciling business needs and user needs in a way that is technically feasible within the time and budget. I don’t do it alone, of course, I have a cross-disciplinary team of designers and developers in my corner.

Every business owner wants to grow their customer database and convert more sales. Most businesses these days have a website, but is it serving them justly? Or are customers falling by the wayside and ending up in competitors' laps? This is inevitable, but there are ways to keep people engaged on your platform and reduce the number of people jumping ship.

Recent studies by industry professionals state that visitors to your website decide whether to stay or leave within 4-8 seconds and that they base their decision largely on whether the website design appeals to them. During that time the credibility of your brand is determined.