As a UX designer, your job is to make sure Web-site visitors have the best user experience possible. However, users are bound to make mistakes. Whether because of their being unfamiliar with your user interface, clicking something accidentally, or simply misinterpreting your instructions, mistakes are all but unavoidable. Nevertheless, you must take steps to prepare for the unexpected so your audience has a smooth, positive experience when they engage with your brand.

While it’s true that some mistakes are great learning experiences for visitors, too many errors can make them feel frustrated and possibly drive them away from your site. So you need to have a little foresight, predict what mistakes your visitors might make, and prevent them before they turn into problems. In this article, I’ll cover several actionable error-prevention strategies for UX design and describe the benefits you can expect if you decide to act by following these strategies. Read More

Aligning User Experience (UX) and Customer Success (CS) for full-funnel growth is a no-brainer. With 88% of customers choosing not to return after a bad experience, intentionally focusing on the alignment of UX and CS becomes critical. Why? When UX and CS work hand in hand, customers experience smoother user journeys and faster issue resolution, and companies gain a better understanding of customers’ painpoints.

Alignment is about creating a frictionless experience that delights users at every touchpoint. This is about more than just solving customers’ problems; it’s about anticipating customers’ needs to exceed their expectations. A strategic approach is essential. The result: increased customer retention and the creation of brand evangelists. In this article, I’ll show you ten ways to get this right. Read More

Are you getting ready to design a mobile over-the-top media service, or over-the-top television (OTT) platform? Where should you start? Many OTT creators find themselves overwhelmed by the technical decisions that are necessary. Therefore, in this article, I’ll focus on the most important details, including the following:

• why the user experience matters
• starting with the user journey
• practical tips for designing the best mobile OTT experience

By the end of this article, you’ll have a clearer picture of what to expect, prioritize, and execute. Let’s get started!

Why an Effective User Experience Matters for OTT Platforms

Optimizing UX design for mobile is all too often overlooked—especially when a company has already spent time and resources on creating a desktop version. But optimizing UX design for mobile is now more important than ever. Read More

If you’ve worked hard to offer a seamless mobile user experience to your customers, but your bounce rates are high, engagement and clicks are low, and you have a rising number of one-time customers rather than repeat business, you need to look for ways to improve user retention in today’s fiercely competitive online marketplace. By enhancing a crucial element of your brand’s success—the mobile user experience—you can achieve higher user-retention rates.

Why does mobile UX design matter so much to user retention? An effective mobile UX design can help you achieve your goals by meeting users’ expectations and keeping them loyal to your app. This requires a user-friendly UX design strategy that can help you captivate and retain your audience. By reading this article, you’ll develop a comprehensive understanding of the various mobile UX design patterns that can enhance the design of your Web site or app to boost user retention. Thus, you can influence users’ behaviors and loyalty and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Read More

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere—a sea change affecting all aspects of life at a rate far faster and more far reaching than anything we’ve experienced thus far. AI promises intelligent companions and copilots that simplify and enrich our daily activities and social interactions at work, in our community, and in our domestic life. The vision is a more pervasive, omnipresent, and active fabric of intelligence that seamlessly wraps around and through all the spaces of people’s lives––ready to activate on command.

However, the path to this vision and its widespread adoption requires progressive design approaches to support its evolution over time. During the formative stages of this technology, UX designers must leverage their expertise to design new user interfaces that effectively leverage dynamic visual affordances and multisensory cues to better guide discoverability and cooperation with fully integrated AI intelligence. Over time, these explicit cues and indicators may recede as the adoption of seamless interactions takes hold. But until then, the practice of visually enhancing the access to and activation of intelligence is necessary. Read More

When using today’s complex digital systems, users must frequently navigate through myriad contexts—for example, shifting from dashboards to reports, from design tools to client feedback, and from product catalogs to checkout pages. Each of these transitions involves not merely a physical change in the user-interface context but necessitates a mental recalibration, requiring users to recall or transfer information that is pertinent to their current task. This phenomenon is known as cognitive distance.

Defining Cognitive Distance

Cognitive distance refers to the mental effort that is necessary to transfer or recall information between disparate contexts within a digital system. Its existence underscores the necessity of minimizing cognitive load by facilitating smoother transitions between tasks to enhance the user experience. As users engage with complex systems, they often face the challenge of remembering crucial details from one context to apply them within another context. This can lead to user frustration and inefficiency. Read More

The recent rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the marketing and Web-development industries. Today, 54% of marketers say they use AI in their role, while 22% say they use it daily. This stunning statistic emphasizes the potential power of AI and proves that tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E are here to stay.

Generative AI can do more than just produce graphics and descriptions for social media. Leveraging AI is key if you work for a firm that prides itself on connecting with clients and customers or relies on repeat purchases. Plus, AI can aid customer-care efforts by collecting additional data relating to the user experience. When used correctly, AI tools can help you personalize user journeys and, thus, deliver more memorable customer experiences. By personalizing the user experience based on accurate customer data that AI algorithms have gathered, sorted, and analyzed, AI can transform your business. Read More

Picture this: You’ve just signed up a new customer, and they’re excited to get going. Everything seems great on paper—until their questions start rolling in.

“How does this feature work?”

“Why can’t I customize my dashboard?”

“Why won’t this integration connect properly?”

Despite the best efforts of your support agents and Customer Success team, confusion about your product might be too much for your customers. Without proper guidance, they could become frustrated and eventually decide to leave. This scenario is all too common. Over 90% of customers believe that companies could do a better job of onboarding, and a UserPilot survey shows that only 24.5% of users adopt a core feature, while the rest abandon it because they don’t immediately understand how to derive value from it. Read More

The right tool makes all the difference in UX and user-interface (UI) design. With hundreds of tools available on the market, selecting the right ones to meet your needs can be challenging. Here’s a look at the top 20 essential tools for UX designers, along with their strengths and drawbacks.

My Framework for Evaluation

I’ll analyze these tools based on five main criteria:

1. Functionality—Core features and capabilities
2. Ease of use—How easy the tool is for new users to learn and use
3. Collaboration features—How well the tool supports team collaboration
4. Integrations—The tool’s compatibility with other tools
5. Value for money—Free or paid—and whether the features justify the price

Let’s get started! Read More