If you’re in the business of selling services via software, you are inevitably looking for ways to clearly differentiate your product from the competition.
One way is to offer more features and greater functionality - bigger online storage, Facebook integration, customer detail fields, spell checkers, etc.
To be sure, the functionality that an application provides to users is important for differentiation. But it is the way in which that application provides the functionality, that truly gives a piece of software the edge. User experience is the key differentiator relative to the competition.
Usabiilty - how easy is it to accomplish a prescribed task, is one essential component of user experience. An application that is difficult to use will simply not be used. An application that does not make it easy to undo mistakes will be frustrating to use. It won’t matter how technically superior your software is or what functionality it provides, if the usability aspect is low, user productivity and usage will be low.
Consistency and predictability are also fundamental principals of user experience design. If the user has learned that clicking and dragging the title bar moves a window, then you can show them software they’ve never use before and they can predict that the way to move a window is to click and drag it. The user knows what will happen when they do something - even for the first time. It gives them a feeling of mastery and control, which is critically important to product use and loyalty.
Other components contributing to user experience include conceptual models, visual design, workflow, perceived performance, and UI including RIAs. Each needs to be addressed and each can be addressed with innovative and differentiated approaches.
The impact of user experience on productivity and user engagement, as well as emotion, loyalty and advocacy, applies to enterprise and work group software as much as it does to consumer applications. We’ve all experienced a wide range of reactions to the software we’ve used (on-premise, web and SaaS). At one end of the spectrum is a positive, empowering response when something is engaging and “just works.” At the other end is frustration. It is this user experience that differentiates software we “love to use” from software we avoid; software that enhances productivity from software that wastes our time.
User experience can act as one of the most powerful differentiators between feature-competitive software products. The right conceptual models, usability, visual design, simplicity, perceived performance, and the feeling of self-service/control all combine to provide easier, faster and more rewarding access to the functions of that software.
Categories: User Experience