UX: Designing the User Experience

Why are over seven hundred companies investing 11.5% of their overall website design and build budgets in usability? Easy. The 2007 Usability & User Experience Survey Report listed the top 6 benefits of usability as follows:  improved perceptions of brand (54%), increased conversion rates (53%), greater customer loyalty and retention (46%), increased customer advocacy (38%), increased traffic (36%), improved search rankings (33%).

Though many might not see the importance of UX yet (only 25% of participating companies rated their commitment as extremely committed), you as a forward-looking company need to keep UX at the top of your list. Many smaller companies rely on in-house expertise, the report states. However, acknowledging the benefits of hiring a UX expert can make your ROI reach higher percentages.
The aim of User Experience (UX) is the target audience you are trying to reach. Instead of focusing on the company’s viewpoint, you need to see the needs your users have and find the best way to approach them.

Peter Morville came up with a good way to explain others how UX works. His UX Honeycomb takes on from the circle triad of Information Architecture (content-context-users), and further develops the various factors to consider in User Experience Design. Beyond being “pretty”, your website needs to address a number of issues, according to the desired approach you want to transmit. As the before mentioned benefits of Usability and User Experience point out, your website can improve in many respects, like traffic increase, which equals to exposure, and mouth-to-mouth advertising. Greater exposure makes your product more available to a larger audience; one that now can benefit from what you have to offer.

What is in it for us?

Why are we promoting UX? Letting you know how it can benefit your business is only a part of it all. We at <AndreaTanzi> perform our work based on UX and overall user-related thinking. We believe UX to be so important and good for business that not only do we sell the concept, but we also use it ourselves.

 No matter how good a business is at what they do, a little perspective from the end-user’s point of view can bring a lot to the game. Embracing UX tells your customers you are concerned beyond profit and gain. It says, “I care about my customer” loud and clear.

UX entails a well-thought, theory-based proposal to either implement or improve your website’s User Experience, be it via content, design or both. Experts in both these areas already working with UX in mind can come up with a product both you and your customer can take advantage of.

Minor investment to make your company a well-oiled machine can turn significantly profitable for all. Having the guidelines of what is expected from them and what you are offering to give, employees will have a better and more focused performance at work. As an employer, it is indispensable for your business to have a well written, tailored and clear employees manual. By doing so, you are structuring your business as a professional, well organized and overall aware of what goes and what does not for your company.

Technology-obsessed or old-school, business men and women will or have already realized not only the need to be part of the Web 2.0, but the hassle building a site can be. Large investments in time and money come hand in hand with dependency and slow updating processes. Being subjected to a web page designer many times becomes a frustrating experience that has companies all around the world wishing for an easy-to-handle software that can set up or redesign their website fast and efficiently.

Why are over seven hundred companies investing 11.5% of their overall website design and build budgets in usability? Easy: improved perceptions of brand, increased conversion rates, greater customer loyalty and retention, increased customer advocacy, increased traffic, improved search rankings.

Coming from a background of mandatory elementary education, today’s Costa Rican IT human resource are born out of a 94.9% literacy rate country - one of the highest in Latin America.
It’s no secret that education in Costa Rica has been a governmental priority, their “army of knowledge” over armed forces, if you will. Favoring investments in education has certainly paid of for this little 4.5 million head country.
Majoring in IT-related areas ten years ago was something relatively overlooked or popular only among an “underground” crowd.

Because our areas of expertise don’t work in isolation, our team can spot the strong and weaker spots of the companies we work with, hence catapulting an infinite amount of options that can improve a particular company’s performance and professional face.

Since I switched careers from the traditional advertising world to the Internet business in 1995 I had been in awe at the talent of Costa Rican technologist. The average Costa Rican person is extremely educated. It?s no secret to the world that we traded arms for books since 1848 when we decided not to have an army and spend that national budget in education. So there?s something in that fact about the Costa Rican mind that applies in every area of knowledge, I suppose. But for the last 10 years this has been specially true in the technology industry.