Good User Experience Traits
Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash
A good user experience is essential for any product or service. Imagine one of your favourite mobile applications, what features does it have that a similar kind of application does not possess? You can come up with various answers for that question, but we can roughly categorise those answers into the following four categories or traits. These traits are considered an essential part of any product or service so that it provides a good user experience. Those are
- Usable
- Equitable
- Enjoyable
- Useful
Let’s go through them one by one to understand the importance.
1️⃣ Usable
The first characteristic is that the product should be usable. This means that the product’s design and structure should be clear and easy to use by the user. As a designer, you can evaluate the usability of the product by asking questions like “Can the user do the intended tasks within the design of the product?”. Also, the results of user testing the product can provide valuable feedback on the usability of the product.
For example, let’s consider a music player application. Hence a good example of usability would be that the user can easily play their favourite song.
2️⃣ Equitable
Equity of a product means that the designing of the product is helpful to people with diverse audiences regardless of their ethnicity, gender or ability. Some of you might get confused equality with equity. Equality means that everyone gets the same resources while equity means that everyone is given the necessary tools to have a good experience. The following illustration will explain this idea further.
When you, as a designer, evaluate the equity of a product, you can ask questions like “Does the product’s design take into account the requirements of the population that have historically been underrepresented?”.
As good features of good equity, you can add features like dark mode, and high contrast mode and add gender-neutral pronouns when applicable.
3️⃣ Enjoyable
If a product or a service is enjoyable, then it means that when the user is using the product it makes them feel happy and delightful. When the user has an enjoyable experience with the product, it will make a positive association with the product and the company that made that product, which will be an added advantage to the company. When you as a designer evaluate the product’s enjoyability you can ask questions like, “Does the design keep the user engaged throughout their experience?”
When you look at examples for the enjoyability of a product, the main aspect we can consider is how much the product can be customised according to the user needs like having multiple colour themes and personalised recommendations.
4️⃣ Useful
The final trait is the usefulness of a product. It means that the product’s design intentionally solves a problem faced by the user. Just as with the words, “equality” and “equity”, “useful” and “usable” has also been misinterpreted by some people. As previously mentioned, usability means how easy the product can be used, while usefulness means the ability to solve users’ problems. As a designer when you evaluate the usefulness of a product you can ask questions like “Does the design help the user to solve a problem?”
If we consider an online taxi application, people download it to book taxis online, but adding a feature like online delivery to the application can be helpful to the users as well.
Now I think you have a good understanding of the four traits of a good user experience design. Do consider these traits when you design your next project, and if you feel this article was useful feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues as well.
Also if you are interested, I have written few other articles in this area. You can find them, from the following links,
Thank you!
