It is shocking how often enterprise clients ask designers for a “next-generation user experience” without articulating beyond that.
Debates around measuring user experience or modernizing designs often leave UX designers trapped in a subjective spiral, struggling to prove their work’s worth. These arguments lead to inevitable back and forth with clients as we aim to hit a moving target. However, if we fail to define a next-gen user experience’s qualities, how will we ever know if our design missions are truly successful?
Much like these 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, we at Radiant decided to quantify what a next-gen UX is, so we have something measurable designers can work against.
Though metrics and KPIs help determine design quality, the degree of customer satisfaction through design impact still awaits to be discerned. Now, here are the five essential attributes of truly next-gen UX designs.
Adaptive
An adaptive user experience bends the technology to the needs, goals, and preferences of active users. In this case, the system usually keeps track of the user’s activities and customizes data and functions to user needs.
The idea is to give each user type a powerful and personalized experience. An adaptive UX with an intuitive design and information presentation lowers the common user’s learning curve.
For example, a business analyst’s view of an interface may have the following elements,
- A dashboard of reports/graphs/performance metrics
- Important market updates
- Business messages
- An elementary and neutral look and feel
- Profile Information
Image Source: Oracle Blogs
On the other hand, for a travel blogger, the UI usually,
- Looks and feels vibrant with colorful elements like images/videos based on personal choice
- Displays the latest trends/news in their field
- Offers quick access to their work files, client messages, etc.
- Includes frequently used work tools (Photoshop/Instagram)
Image Source: Collect UI
Thus, different themes and components must be visible (or invisible) and the right amount of information based on the active user’s job responsibility and persona. This ensures that the UX design is user-friendly and that components or features that don’t apply to different users are filtered. In the example above, the common system components visible for different users include message inbox, profile info, application settings, etc. Simultaneously, reports are displayed only for the business analyst, and travel videos are displayed solely for the travel blogger.
