Does your current service model and technology allow you to effectively measure end user experience (UX) in real-time, from the employee’s perspective? The focus tends to be on issues reported to the service desk, but how many are never reported? What if degraded performance has become the norm? The perception of IT is also degraded. If your users don’t bother to complain anymore, you are not winning the service journey.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, it would have been faster horses”
– Henry Ford
This famous quote symbolises service delivery keeping IT in reactive, fire-fighting mode, versus taking steps to improve user experience in a proactive way, that better aligns IT to the business. It requires a different way of thinking. After all “the thinking that got you to where you are now, won’t get you to where you need to be.”
What Is User Experience?
User Experience can be defined as the technology that goes beyond fulfilling its instrumental needs put forward by humans. It is subjective in nature and consists of complex and dynamic encounters of human-computer interaction (HCI). There are three major components of UX:
The consequence of a user’s internal state (expectations, motivation, mood, etc).
The characteristics of the design system of technology.
The context within which the interaction between humans and computers takes place.
Ever since the beginning of the 21st century, UX became the talk of the town, especially in the IT sector. It was the phenomenon that played an important role in how humans interacted with computers. As technology grew more sophisticated, the human-computer interaction became more intricate, complex, and imperative.
What is The Importance Of User Experience In 2021?
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, there has been a sudden change in the way people interact with technology. In the year 2021, human beings have started spending more time online. Their behaviour on the internet has also undergone a major overhaul. Experts believe that these changes in Human-Computer Interactions will become the basis for the progress of UX for years to come.
According to UXMagazine, there are seven elements of UX that companies will need to focus on, in order to gain a plausible advantage over their competitors in 2021:
Voice Interfaces: As chatbots and virtual assistants continue to grow in popularity, the requirement for a voice interface will become a basic necessity for mobile apps, websites, and other tools.
Simplistic User Interface: Gone are the days of big and jazzy fonts and complicated instructions. Users need their job done quickly and in a well-organised manner. They are willing to sacrifice looking at multiple pop-ups, notifications, and advertisements very happily. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that developers must curb their creativity in presenting new and important information.
Negative Space: Negative Space refers to the empty or blank areas across a webpage which is surrounded by certain objects. Over the years, the fondness for negative space has grown significantly. Check out the minimalistic homepage design for Google that has not only been pleasing to look at but also gets the work done.
Imperfect Elements And Asymmetry: Remember when your boss wanted every single panel, image, and font to look just perfect? Crisp edges, all the colours inside the borders and not a pixel of imperfection on your website? Experts believe that imperfect elements create a sense of relatability between the service provider and their customers.
Softer Elements: One of the biggest changes that UX monitors will see from 2021 onwards is the use of “softer-looking” elements. These include buttons that are more round than box-like. The edges are curved rather than sharp and the overall look and feel on the page looks more pale and soothing to the eyes rather than being absolutely contrast in colours. This is also known as Neumorphism.
3D Elements And Animation: The era of 2D pictures and video may be at its twilight and User Experience designers are moving towards making things visible in a three-dimensional space. The animation or the way in which on-page move upon interaction, is also getting a lot of attention. However, you will also have to be careful about how much animation to use as it can delay the loading time, which can, in turn, spoil the UX even more.
Information Architecture: How you show the information on your website is as important as the information itself. The display, design and structure in which information flows throw a page determine the kind of attention with which potential customers may be interacting with your content, product and services.
What Is The Importance Of User Experience In The IT Sector?
In the IT sector, UX has become more important than ever. As an increasing number of companies move towards automation and cloud-based services in order to look after their businesses, it is ab absolute necessity for the software to look after the seven elements of UX mentioned above. These products must ensure that anticipate the users’ potential needs, wants, demands and even moods, in order to serve them more efficiently.
Many IT experts will talk about User Experience in one of the following terms: User-Centered Design, User Interface (UI) or Graphical User Interface (GUI), Usability, Human Factors & Ergonomics or Human-Computer Interaction. However, the fact remains that a good UX is not any one of these features but a unique and rather rare combination of all of them.
Take A Step Into The Future Of UX With Bright Horse
Information Technology cannot fire-fight its way to continual improvement, it requires a decision today to take the first step in a new direction. We continue to enjoy running half-day workshops across the UK, designed to explore the steps required to build towards pro-active service delivery that prioritises driving value around UX. At these events, we discuss how to shift from service level agreements (SLAs) to experience level agreements (XLAs) and improve their UX.
Our partner, Nexthink empowers organisations to gain full visibility into UX and where to improve. Their digital experience score provides IT with a single score out of 10 that comprises rich data and real user feedback to inform IT was to make pro-active changes that will boost employee IT experience and increase productivity and engagement. Find out how Bright Horse and Nexthink can help you enhance your User Experience.
The discussions our workshops foster, coupled with attendee feedback, show that organisations are at varying stages of this transformation and that it requires a cultural step-change in thinking – Nexthinking you could say!