UI and the Need to Meet User Demands
If you’ve ever worked in retail or food service, you’re probably sick of hearing about how “the customer is always right.” After dealing with enough people who you’d swear up and down are anything but “right,” it can be difficult to spend time and resources making sure they have things exactly the way they want them.
However, when it comes to software development and testing, you need to keep user needs on your mind as often as possible. If you don’t create something they want, need, or enjoy using, you’ll find yourself with a barren user base before too long.
This customer-centric mindset might be most important when it comes to the user experience and user interface. With so many different available options on mobile devices, if users don’t like the way your app runs, looks, or functions, they’ll drop it before you get a chance to update anything.
But is there such a thing as being too obsessed with what your customer wants? Can thinking of their needs over what might make sense for your product lead to failure? Gil Sever, the cofounder and CEO of Applitools, recently spoke to StickyMinds about this issue.
“There will always be debate about what customers want or need in terms of features and functionality, but once you’ve made the commitment as a dev team to build them—you should absolutely be obsessed with making sure the customer experiences them exactly as intended,” Sever explained. “There is no possible drawback to that obsession in my opinion. And, analysts from Forrester, for example, have proven that a better customer experience directly correlates to with higher revenue growth for the business.”
Making that commitment isn’t easy, but you need to be able to meet and even exceed the expectations of your users if you have any hope of staying competitive in the business space you occupy. And in many cases, you’ll need to discover what your users want without even directly asking them.
It’s a tall task, but in the mobile world, you need to provide your audience with an application that looks and feels as good or better than your competition. By putting a greater emphasis on your UX and making a concerted effort to satisfy your users, you’ll find yourself in a position to succeed at every level.
