UX and UI are the best indicators of how well your software provider understands your business, your users and your processes.
The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. Ideally, that same navigational axiom governs a software solution’s user experience and user interface.
A solution that forces the user to zig-zag through numerous screens or jump from one application to another to reach their end-goal is a poorly designed solution reflecting an incomplete understanding of its users. You could say the same for a solution that overloads users with unnecessary data or one that lacks features necessary to resolve a vast majority of scenarios its users are most likely to encounter.
The UX is the roadmap, the features and navigation leading the user from log-in to completing their given task — without detours. The UI is the road itself — clean, attractive and self-explanatory screens acting as waypoints along the journey. Want to make a team of software developers happy? Tell them their UI and UX are simple, functional and intuitive. Want to make a software user happy? Design the UI and UX to be simple, functional and intuitive.
That’s no simple feat. A business software solution will typically be used by several different categories of users within an organization, each driven by distinct responsibilities, facing unique scenarios and possessing various degrees of technology-related sophistication. UX and UI design is about understanding the overall journey of users and turning it into a product. Development teams need to be tuned into each user group.
A single contact center solution, for example, should present 4 different user-groups — executives, managers, supervisors and agents — with a common dashboard, one that addresses their distinct needs equally well. The UI and UX should be the same for each group, the only differences being the data-set they’re able to view and the KPIs important to that particular user demographic.
· At the executive-level, the data should be aggregated at a high level to help decision-makers understand a contact center’s performance as it relates to larger business goals, such as identifying business and sales patterns, understanding customer behaviors and identifying strengths and weaknesses within the company.
· Using the same dashboard, contact center managers are looking at more refined data to develop day-to-day objectives, plan resources to maximize productivity, and analyze performance statistics.
· In turn, supervisors access more granular data to help them monitor agent performance, track important call metrics, answer agent questions, troubleshoot issues, identify training needs, and help set call center goals.
· Agents’ data needs are the most tactical of all, relating to their personal productivity and call-by-call effectiveness.
Bringing the user’s voice into UI and UX design
A UX designer’s work is mostly conceptual problem-solving based on research and data, the UI being its visual manifestation. For product managers and developers, it comes down to listening to the voice of the customer, with an important caveat: developers are creating the best possible product for the widest range of clients, not a customized product for the loudest.
Any solution and its development roadmap should be the product of a partnership between the provider and its entire user community, a feedback-loop that identifies common denominators. Customers, not development teams, define likes and dislikes and guide future feature/function enhancements.
Beyond direct customer feedback, developers can perform audits to see how customers navigate the solution and how many times customers run particular reports or features. Under-utilization is a key indicator of bad design or miscommunication, as is a user’s lack of product engagement throughout the completion of a task. If a user is required to log in to another application outside the solution, there’s a problem; the user experience needs to be contained in one product and operate in an intuitive navigational setting. Developers must continually monitor user activity to see if they’re confused or navigating in an intended way.
The importance of UX and UI is undeniable. For most users, the UI/UX is the product — much more so than the technology and code behind it. For a provider, the UI and UX are gateways into the value they deliver. They are crucial to customer satisfaction and brand reputation, making collaboration between developers and users essential.
