Book Image

Fixing Bad UX Designs

By : Lisandra Maioli
Book Image

Fixing Bad UX Designs

By: Lisandra Maioli

Overview of this book

Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money? This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you’ll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You’ll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more. The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems. As we progress, you’ll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You’ll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book. By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Metrics and KPI's

The interesting thing is that having all the stakeholders' support and collaboration can also accelerate the UX process, and consequently determine the success of the project. To be able to measure it, you will need to define the metrics and KPIs with the stakeholders in order to demonstrate the results, bringing us back to the matter of how we show the ROI of the UX.

The KPI's (key performance indicators), or ways to measure performance, will help you to demonstrate the success of all the UX issues that were fixed or changed. They can be different indicators and come from different sources, such as user research (usability testing, surveys, structured interviews, heuristic evaluations, card sorting, heat maps, A/B tests, and so on) and/or analytics, as soon as task success rate, time on task, page views, clicks, taps, and so on:

An example of an A/B test result

You should also consider more business-focused goals and indicators, which means any user touchpoint, such as customer acquisition cost, which is a growth MKT metric; average ticket, which can be impacted by increasing the conversion rate; and also sales data, churn rate, lead generation stats, active users, support calls, basket abandonment, subscribers, returning visitors, and so on:

The online tool Loop11.com lets you make remote and unmoderated user testing

Besides it being important to define KPI's that you will be able to measure, you should also create a framework to track all these metrics. For example, you can create a framework for defining tasks, users, and metrics, and then measure before and after making changes:

Framework to evaluate and improve the user experience presented by Jeff Sauro on his blog post for MeasuringU

To be able to define these metrics, you will need to understand the company's business goals, direction, and objectives. Having these definitions will help you to align the project objectives to the UX strategy and focus on what you should fix to help the company reach these goals.

It is important to keep in mind that designing an effective user experience requires an understanding of the needs of both the business and users in order to designing a solution that meets them. By understanding the business goals and user needs, it will help you to find exactly what you should fix on the bad UX design (which is what we will see in the following chapters):