Enhancing user experience design with personalisation with Adobe Express.

What is user experience design?

User experience design is the process of researching and creating all those different elements that go into shaping a user’s experience with a service or product. It considers the entire customer journey and can apply to a range of things, for example:

• How a product feels to hold and interact with.
• The ease of navigation on a web page.
• How easy it is to check out with a product online.
• The readability of something like a flyer.
• The method of deleting a message on an app.

By combining market research, development, design and strategy as well as elements like branding, you can create a user experience that adheres to a customer’s wants, needs and expectations.

What are the benefits of a personalised UX design?

Creating a seamless experience for a customer can be tricky – no number of focus groups is going to help you fit all your customers into an absolute box. That’s where a personalised UX design can help.

Personalisation provides the user (and you) with a range of benefits:

• Makes your content more engaging. Personalising a user’s experience could be as simple as allowing them to navigate your platform in the way they want or adjusting what they see to their interests. This lets them build a stronger emotional connection with the platform.
• Increases customer loyalty. By creating a personalised customer experience, you can show your audience that your brand understands their preferences. This can lead to better engagement and more customers returning in the future.
• Provides customer agency. Giving your customers agency allows them to customise their own experience. This can remove frustration and ease usage of a platform.
• Improved customer journey and conversion rates. By creating a curated and seamless experience for the particular customer, you increase the chances of a smooth customer journey and present a higher chance of conversion or engagement.
• Even technologies can be personalised. A service designed with personalised technologies in mind allows for curated advertising, chatbots, recommendation systems and other functions such as predictive analytics. This can help further personalise a customer’s experience.

Define your user personas.

By creating personas for each user experience, designers can get a better understanding of who they’re creating a service for. Personalistion starts with knowing who your audience is and determining their unique needs.

Design for personalisation.

Leaving design space for personalisation is the first step – it’s harder to personalise a service or product when all that space is accounted for. Try to account for this at the ground level in the early stages of planning out your designs. Consider elements like interface customisation, personalised recommendations and more.

Test, test, test.

You can’t throw in a hundred different ideas. Consider how these personalisation efforts affect users. Does it make things cluttered? Are your recommendations actually relevant? Is your UX customisation interface easy to understand and access?

Learn what works, what doesn’t, and don’t be afraid to iterate on your learnings. Whether it’s A/B testing, split tests, MVB – or whatever systems you use, it’s important to try and identify potential issues (or improvements.)

Make time for feedback.

Be receptive to feedback – learning to listen to your user base is one of the best ways to personalise your user experience design. What do they need? What are the main issues in your current design?

Reflect on the data.

Think of this as another form of feedback. By utilising data analytics, you can find key areas where people may be struggling with your site. If you’re losing a lot of customers at the checkout stage, or find that people are disabling certain features, it can be a good indication that you need to review these designs.