5 User Experience Quotes to Live By

So many websites spend a lot of time, effort, and money on getting people to visit their website. They’ll place ads, they’ll optimize for keywords, they’ll sponsor posts, and they’ll get social. All of these tactics are effective and we often recommend these to clients here at DOZ.

But it’s one thing to get someone to visit your site, and it’s another thing altogether to provide them with the sort of service that sees them returning to your site in the future.

An advertisement might be great for bringing a new customer to your site but only a good experience on your site will have them clicking again. This experience, what we can call the user experience or UX, is therefore an incredibly important element in your digital marketing strategy. Neglect it and all that traffic that you work so hard and spend so much to attract won’t be converted into customers.

A Team Approach to UX

As you’d expect, UX is important enough that many people have chipped in over the years with ideas about how to best achieve the perfect UX. There are guidelines, checklists, spreadsheets and complete books written on the subject. And, yes, there is even a UX for Dummies guide if you’re really starting from scratch.

Here at DOZ we help connect clients to a marketplace of experts who can audit a company’s UX and provide clear feedback about areas to improve. But we also have our own site to maintain and our own product to sell – hey, we’re in business, right? – and so UX is something we discuss regularly around our own office, too.

Whether it is our lead designer and his team, our engineers and software techs, our marketing team, our sales team, or our customer support and account managers, everyone plays a part in evaluating our existing UX and suggesting changes to further improve the experience for our visitors.

We talk about workflows, we track how users actually use the site, we use the tools we have to track how they interact with our site, and we ask people to complete mock signups for our services and record their interaction with the site to see where the pain points are. We change colors, move buttons, refine, refresh, and rebuild pages where we find even the smallest issues.

We also look for inspiration from other sites and from experts who have developed onboarding and workflows, sites and web applications that, well, just work. Where we find a site that is particularly good, we share it with the rest of the team and talk about how we can improve our own approach.

In the past we’ve highlighted some of those companies with a great digital UX here on The DOZ Blog. But we also find that sometimes our inspiration comes in other forms, and notably in the form of quotes.

Five UX Quotes to Live By

The quotes below are some of our favorites here at DOZ. They remind us, as they’ll likely remind you, of some of the key UX issues that every website encounters and the ways in which UX audits, assessments, and adjustments should be approached.

Got your own favorite UX quote? Share it with us on Twitter!

If your business isn’t mobile friendly, your business is dead. (Jonathan Stark)

We’ve written a lot about making your site mobile friendly in the last year, and not only because Google adjusted their search algorithms to favor mobile-friendly sites in the fabled Mobilegeddon. The fact is that more people are accessing the web via a smartphone and sites need to be prepared to serve their pages and their offers on a smaller screen and driven by less-powerful processors.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, and this means more than just being accessible on a mobile device, then you’ll likely be losing customers. As a result, it’s essential your mobile experience is as good as it can be and that the mobile version of your site is not ignored in favor of the desktop version.

“Does it better” will always beat “did it first.” (Aaron Levie)

Let’s not deny it: there is such a thing as a first-mover advantage. But despite the idea that “done today is better than perfect tomorrow”, when it comes to UX getting it right and keeping that customer is far more important than winning eyeballs with a less-than-perfect product.

The go-to example in the last twelve months has got to be streaming video and the competition between Meerkat and Periscope. The first to market was Meerkat and it created a buzz out of the SXSW festival that generated global interest and millions in venture capital. But Meerkat wasn’t ready for the big time, had issues with the user experience, and didn’t integrate easily with other apps. When Periscope appeared with its superior UX and it’s integration with Twitter it was game over for Meerkat.

They did it better, and they won.

Spend as much time on copy as you do on visuals. (John Zeratsky)

OK, I admit to being a little biased on this one as the guy who writes most of the copy on the DOZ site, but it’s true. The position of a button on a web site is important, but so is the text on that button. A headline needs to be in the right place but it also needs to communicate the right sentiment.

The copywriter needs to be in on the meetings about UX from the get-go. It’s not enough to build a website and then get the copywriter to fill in the blanks. And it’s not a good idea to fill a site with lorem ipsum dummy text and tell the copywriter that a six month UX project is live next week.

The designers and the copywriters need to work together, exchange ideas, and help improve the UX of a site together, not separately.

You’re designing a product for people, and it doesn’t matter if it’s on Android or iPhone or Windows Phone. (Joey Flynn)

Flynn makes an excellent point here: no matter what platform you are designing for you are still designing for people. If the person cannot or will not use your product it won’t matter what platform they are using for the rest of their day.

The key to building a good site, app, or digital product is putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and seeing the product through their eyes. No matter the platform, the things that the user finds useful will be the same, the things that delight will be the same, and the onboarding process needs to be just as simple.

UX is about putting the experience of the customer at the center of development and design, and this means thinking about the experience ahead of any platform-specific issues.

Easy is hard. (Peter Lewis)

This is what we repeat when we have a UX problem to solve: easy is hard.

We’ve al seen some incredible UX and we strove to provide the same on our site. Making things simple, making things easy for the customer is hard work. When a site seems intuitive, when an onboarding seems painless, when a button appears at just the right time and in just the expected place we take notice, and we also know that this wasn’t by accident. Easy is hard, damn hard.

Good UX doesn’t emerge out of the ether but instead is a long slog by a team of people committed to delivering for the customer and making the experience seamless.

Got your own favorite UX quote? Let us know on Twitter!