Lockdown: A Time to Work on Your UX

Lockdown has been a hard time for all of us. It has been less challenging compared to the managing difficulties it posed to us in managing the three firms we founded together. 

The past few weeks have been entirely new for all of us. For example, managing work from home schedules, assigning tasks, tracking progress all this with an uncertainty of when we are going to get back to the old way of doing things. 

COVID-19 crisis has opened a new perspective. Things are no more as they used to be. For example, specific meetings have now become an email, and certain works show that they can be managed distantly.  

As someone who has to keep the creative and innovative needle ticking, we would suggest this lockdown as a pullover and think time. Notable companies are recouping to make the post lockdown era more receptive technologically. In this write-up, we are exploring the things that should be on every tech company’s “to-do list” and why they need to collaborate with a UX agency.

What Should Businesses Focus on Now?

Entrepreneurs and founders are in a fix right now. The real problem is where to start. Soon after the coming of lockdown, we met with some of the other founders and entrepreneurs to discuss the situation at hand and to comprehend this unprecedented chain of events. 

Besides going about the seriousness of the current situation for the businesses around the world, we were able to underline some critical concerns that every business owner, innovator, start-up managers, etc. would have at this time. They were:

• How to acquire new customers?

• How to keep communications intact with existing customers?

• How to downsize the business?

• Ways to gather the required capital to keep the firms running

• Investing in new and existing products

• How to increase the visibility of businesses online

These are the crucial aspects every company must consider and start working on to keep themselves going during this low tide. And if the practical bottlenecks in these areas are solved, when the tide turns, it will give the companies a head-start. 

Why Work With a UX Agency Now?

Every product owner has a dream when they begin.  And that is to provide some meaningful utility through their product ideas. But time evolves everything. The product idea that quenched the thirst of users a year before won’t do it today. Even if it does today, the degree of satisfaction would be far lower than it was a year ago. 

Hence organizations are always in a constant battle with time. Whether the COVID-19 or any other epidemic one battle is to stay here forever and that is the battle for “self-improvement”.So if there is one thing we all need to do when we have a lot of time at home and less of travel time to waste, we need to work on improving our products. 

Product development is the need of the hour. Well, looks like its just, not us who are on this path. Tech-giants like Microsoft, Tesla and, others are also working intensively in this direction. For example, when Zoom magic captured the imagination of the IT industry in the initial days of lockdown. No one saw the flaws it had, well even Zoom hadn’t anticipated the scenarios which its conferencing app was going to face.

But Microsoft was already re-working on its video conferencing products and by the time the glitches in Zoom came out in the public they were ready with their new product update.  It was after many years that Microsoft updated its Skype user numbers and is pushing the Meet Now feature to set-up meetings easily. Hence, collaborating with a UX design company is an intelligent start to this future making move.

A User Experience makeover means making the product more aligned with user expectations. It means that a user will now have less difficulty finding his way around an app, a website or any other product. When you work with a UX company, you are transforming the customer experience and, customer experience has a direct relation to the Return on Investment (RoI).

It is no wonder that companies like Google, Airbnb, Intuit place user experience at the centre of their work processes. Because greater the user experience greater will be the :

• Customer Loyalty - Great experience brings customers toward a product again and again

• Customer Satisfaction - A pleasing user experience means a smooth customer journey and higher satisfaction

• Customer Retention - Satisfied and loyal customers help firms retain existing clients and spend more time on finding new ones

• Brand Loyalty - all the above three creates value for your brand as the number of satisfied customers increases.

Who Should go for a UX-based Product Development now?

Some firms may have just wound up their product development procedures, or some others may feel that their product needs no improvement or making improvements is not feasible. We would like to tell them that the present scenario is an unforeseen one and many things you took as obvious may no more be the same. For example, planning how you travel was easy before, just visa and passport, but now it won’t be so in the near future. You will have to look for corona lockdown zones, carefully avoid pandemic hotspots. 

Similarly, many other factors that we took for granted, in the unconscious,  have changed and a UX redesign is in place to align your company with the current situations. In this new atmosphere the three groups whom we strongly recommend to go for a UX collaboration are :

1.Those with a New Product

The firms with a new product are in the ideation stage. It is the best time for them to go for a Minimum Viable Product(MVP). Because the starting energy is usually very high and founders can use that push to engage with an innovative UX agency and get a visual clarity about the way they want their products in the market in the form of screens or prototypes.

2.People with a successful MVP in hand

The firms who are in the MVP stage with only the essential features come under this category. Since the usability test is already done in the MVP stage, the team can use data analysis to make a road map for a product that goes long into the future. Making use of user behaviour data, they can collaborate with a UX team to build the right product before handing over to the development team.

3.Companies with existing products

Those with products that are live and having customer engagements can also improve by leveraging and collecting statistical data. However, such companies need to continually refine their products through active user engagement and feedback collection.

Make use of this lockdown period to study your product frailties and design new UX pathways for better customer experience and engagement.