Creation of a UX design for a software product is an ongoing process: it doesn’t stop after the product is released. In order for an app or a website to always remain comfortable to use while corresponding to the constantly changing trends, its UX design must be improved from time to time, and in some cases even rethinked and radically changed. An outdated, old-fashioned design with unimproved bugs will definitely spoil user experience and lead to loss of audience. Design improvements include not only bug fixing and “brushing up” the facade of a product, but also constant research and implementation of new ideas that can contribute to its growth. Let’s discuss a few simple steps that can improve the UX design of any product.
Pay attention to feedback
Users’ feedback is the best source to find ideas on how to improve the product. No one can tell you what your users want better than the users themselves. Sometimes improving small inconveniences that users complain about in their reviews is enough to make an app or a website much more pleasant to use. Some users might even bring you ideas that you’ve never thought about. In order to get more feedback, stimulate users to leave reviews in app stores, or conduct surveys through email or special tools. In the survey, you can ask specific questions that will help highlight some problems that should be fixed. Study what hinders the seamless experience for users in your product and improve it. Sometimes complaints might relate to some parts of UX that seem perfect to you - but remember, that the product should be user-oriented, so you should always take users’ opinion in consideration first.
Re-conduct user research
Conducting user research before designing UI/UX of a product is mandatory. But the thing is, your audience can change with time, its requests can transform depending on different factors like trends or technology development. Contrary to a popular belief, user research is not something that should be done only at the start of the development process. Surely, at first it helps to form a general picture of the target audience. But as the software product grows, its target users and their requests can evolve as well. That’s why it’s important to always study user-related data to always make UX design meet the needs of your users. Does your product still give its users what they need? To answer that question, you can re-conduct user research. It can be done with the help of product’s stats, surveys, polls and other tools that reflect the data on the audience that’s already using the product. All this will give you some worthy ideas on what exactly should be improved in terms of UI/UX so that the product would correspond to the current needs of its audience more.
Keep UX of a product simple and neat
Keeping UX simple doesn’t mean making it mediocre and boring. It means that the product shouldn’t contain excess elements and functions that don’t contribute to users’ comfort and only distract them. Revise the product from time to time to find out such excess elements and either cut them off, or think out how to make them more useful. Checking product’s stats is also a great tool to learn which parts of the product are necessary and which are not.
Remove unnecessary components
Relating to the previous point, a great way to make the product more “clean” is to remove the unnecessary components that only overload it and don’t carry important information. Pay attention to unclickable graphic elements, pages with too much text or images, irrelevant or outdated content, external links and other elements that might confuse users rather than contribute to their seamless navigation.
Make the content more readable
A page that is easy to quickly run through with eyes always looks much more appealing than a page overfilled with content. The best way to avoid overloading users’ vision and perception is to add white space between elements. There should be white space between the lines, paragraphs and visual elements. It makes the page look more structured, neat and easy to look through when searching for a particular element.
Work on responsiveness
Responsive design is not only a trend, it’s a necessity in our era of various devices and platforms, so it’s always a good idea to improve your product in this direction. Make sure that your website is mobile-optimized, or that your app works fine on all types of smartphones that your target audience uses. The most important thing is to check whether information is displayed fully on any screen without going out of frameworks or getting cluttered.
Re-evaluate content quality
Content quality is something that forms the final impression of the product, and in order not to get outdated it should be re-evaluated from time to time. For example, images and graphic elements that you’ve put in an app a couple years ago might no longer look modern, or some information might not be relevant anymore. Work on re-filling the product with high-quality images, modern-looking elements and up-to-date info so that it could stay relevant and trendy.
Follow UX trends
Trends play a huge role in defining how a modern product should look, and UX is not an exception. Following trends doesn’t mean that you should blindly implement them all in a product - it means that you should keep up with tendencies and make the product look up-to-date. Outdated look will make the product seem “abandoned” and give users a bad impression.
Conclusion
As any aspect of an app or a website, UI/UX design is not something that should stay untouched after the product is launched. Regular fixes, improvements and upgrades are what help the product remain relevant, trendy and appealing to users. Out-fashioned design, on the contrary, makes the product not only inconvenient to use, but also losing in the never-ending competition on the market. The reason some companies neglect the UI/UX of their products is because its complete redesign is very costly both in terms of budget and time. But there are a lot of simple ways to make small improvements that will make the product look more modern and fresh.
