By failing to define what “engagement” means for their target audience and developing a win-win situation where organizational and user goals are both met, businesses perpetuate a downward spiral trying to amass clicks, likes, and newsletter signups.

Don’t separate UX and CX. Regardless of how you refer to them—customers or users—they are all people interacting with your brand. Get the most out of the time and money you put into user research to examine and improve the entire customer experience.

By thinking about end users as we develop new technologies and policies, we can educate users, encourage the behaviors that lead to good security practices, and help users when, inevitably, something goes wrong.

While UX metrics can and should be used to define a UX return on investment (ROI), their most important role is in helping your team focus on what you need to do to improve your product, make informed UX decisions, and ultimately meet your business goals.

Consider diary studies when your team is interested in users’ behaviors, preferences, and subjective reactions over time and where understanding context is particularly important.

While there are a lot of uncertainties as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is one thing I am certain of: businesses that focus on the customer experience stand a better chance of weathering the storm than businesses that don’t.

Personas and user journeys provide a shared understanding of who you are designing for. That means you’ll spend less time arguing over personal preferences and instead focus on the needs of the people who will actually use the website or app.

When someone lands on your website, they have a goal in mind. They are not on your website to kill time (usually). They want to get in, accomplish their task, and get out.

Instead of making UX changes blindly—hoping the right design, content, and features magically fall into place—consider involving your users to shape a dynamic and evolving UX strategy that is far more likely to deliver the results you expect.

Recently, trust—or the violation of trust—has been a big topic. From data breaches to the misleading use of customer data, consumers are starting to take notice. When does that awareness start to impact your business? When your customers’ behaviors change as a result of their lack of trust.

IA refers to how things are organized, structured, and named. Everything you do online requires you to take notice of, process, and interact with a website’s information architecture in order to find information or accomplish a task.

User journeys break down a complex series of interrelated actions and feelings into a visual format that is comprehensive but also digestible and easy to share.

Many organizations don’t understand that digital security is a human problem. That means we can’t solve it by building bigger and bigger barricades. We have to understand humans: their behaviors, goals, and motivations.

With what we’re asking today’s technology to do, you simply can’t get away with shipping something that’s new and cool and simply hope the user experience falls into place. You need a UX strategy.

User experience research is required to develop a clear plan for moving forward. And, since digital projects inevitably require flexibility, user experience research will help you adapt your strategy throughout the lifetime of your digital product.

It can be really frustrating to be the only person on your team who cares about the user experience (UX). So, what do you do? You put your user experience researcher hat on and figure out how to best communicate with your client, boss, or other stakeholders.

The UI is one piece that makes up the user’s experience: what the user sees (or hears) and interacts with. UX (user experience) refers to a users’ perspective, thoughts, and feelings using a digital product.

A persona is the output of user research, which may have taken the form of ethnographic studies, user interviews, surveys, and diary studies with actual or representative users. Most importantly, the personas you develop were based on research—not guessing.

Ingrained behaviors, subconscious snap judgements, and social norms aren’t going to change anytime soon. So why do businesses violate these expectations in online experiences?

Forms can frustrate users and can lead them to abandoning the form—and website—altogether. This can be disastrous for your digital product if it relies on forms to move users to the next level of engagement.