When you think of user experience, your first thought usually goes to the end-user. That’s fair, cause that’s in most cases the more important user of your digital product. In all honesty, in most cases you should also prioritize that as it brings in the most money. There are more levels of user experience though, that can save you time, money and headaches.
User experience for the end-user
As mentioned in the intro, the end-user is who usually the person you want to optimize the user experience for the most. They are the ones buying your products or services and need the best experience possible. Imagine trying to buy a product, but you need to get through 10 steps of a form to place your order. Imagine you own a product that you need help with, but you need to talk to a robot for an hour before getting to a solution. These are experiences that will most likely cause you to shop at the competitor.
So in other words, you want your end-user to be happy and remember their customer journey for positive reasons. They needed help and got it straightaway. They wanted to order your product and it just took them 2 minutes to order. Important information to your end-users needs to be available within a reasonably small amount of clicks, making them come to your website for quick solutions.
User experience for the product owner
Once you have made sure your end-user gets a proper user experience, it’s time to get the product owner the tools to spend as little time on the product as needed. Every task that can be automated should be automated. Also, every task that can not be automated, should be as easy as possible to be completed. This is why I put extra effort into your editing experience. If you ever worry about the time invested into the backend you’re using, keep in mind you will save time the more you use your product. The investment will come back to you!
User experience for the developer
Understandably the least favorite part to invest in, is the user experience for the developer. As long as you get the functionality you are looking for in the least amount of time possible, right? Of course, when I say it like that, I make it sound ridiculous, but it’s actually not. It’s a logical assumption that as long as it works, it’s good. But here’s the kicker: when code is put together like entangled spaghetti, it will take any developer much more time to work on the project. Pour commented code, lack of testing and easy solutions are usually the cause of higher costs in the future. Be open to your developer spending time on improving the code structure of your project and give the time to build it right in the first place. This investment will also come back to you!
Determine you priorities
In the end, it’s all about how you set your priorities. Gaining user experience for yourself or your developer should not interfere with the user experience of your end-user (unless perhaps for security reasons). But not spending any time on it will cost you and your developer more time than needed, so where do you actually put the balance? You could go for a simple effort-cost calculation. How much does it cost to build it, and how much time will you save with it? How fast do you actually earn back your investment?
A simple example: I spend three days in building an invoice generator in my custom CRM. This saves me about 30 minutes per invoice, as I would otherwise have to look up how much a customer owes, what services and products have been completed and what’s this customers’ payment term, after which I’d have to setup a PDF file, and send it by e-mail to the customer. All of this is now done with about 4 to 5 clicks (1 click was undoable without increasing the risk of making mistakes). This would mean that after sending about 48 invoices, I got my investment back. That might sound like a lot, especially for a freelancer, but bare in mind after you have earned it back and even while earning it back, you have the 30 minutes per invoice available to create more products and deliver more services.
Look at your internal process and look for actions you can automate or save time on. Get in touch to get some free advise, there’s almost always something to gain!
