User experience in terms of a website, web application or a mobile application is all about usability. As a user, you need to feel comfortable when you use a certain application. The experience of using this application must be meaningful and engaging.

When developers build an application, irrespective of the development platform or OS, they need to cater to a user’s perception of the application’s efficiency, convenience and utility. As far as the user experience is concerned, it’s all about giving the right direction to the user’s feelings and thoughts about the system in question. The difficulty in ensuring an effective user experience lies in the fact that it’s subjective and changes from one user to another and it’s also circumstantial; it keeps changing over time and is dynamic.

But there are certain factors that definitely play a crucial role in ensuring a satisfactory user experience.

Let’s take a look at two of them.

Simplicity, but within the limits of logic

If you want to travel from Point A to Point B, do you take the longer route or the shorter route? It’s a given that, a person is always looking for a simpler solution. But, this is where, developers miss a trick. Simplicity is not only about reducing the clicks in an application. There is absolutely no doubt that design optimization plays a crucial role in offering an effective user experience, but the focus should always be on reducing the mental effort rather than the physical effort of using a system. In an attempt to make the application as simple as possible, some developers are guilty of making it harder to use. By reducing the number of steps to perform a given activity, they make users think more and do less.

In order to ensure the ideal psychological and physical response from the users, the system needs to be kept simple, but not overtly so. It’s important that a user does not struggle with a certain concept, just because you want to keep the design simple. It’s important that the simplicity is propped up by logic. Failure to do so, will only give rise to complexity.

One-Size-Doesn’t-fit All

An oft-repeated phrase, boring to quote and difficult to implement! But, to ensure satisfying user experience, you will need to ensure that the design is acceptable to the majority of people who are using the application/system.  The situation is definitely a little tricky, but like everything else, there is always a way out.

You need to aim to make the design as productive as possible. It’s simply not necessary that you offer a design that meets the expectations of a large section of users. If you can achieve this, pat yourself on the back, but if you can’t find a way out, it’s important that you make things easier for users. A case in point being options – numerous options thrown at the user can lead to confusion. But, by using a design that leads up to users choosing the option that you have presented to them, is a much simpler way of going about things.

The factors mentioned above might sound as if web developers are trying to dumb down the system. But, even if it looks that way, it’s still improving the user experience a long way, and it’s only this that is going to ensure a successful app. Nothing else! So, don’t shy away from dumbing the app system down.