Just a selection of bits and pieces

Our Top 7 UX skills

Posted by

Our Top 7 UX skills close
Article Reading Time: < 1 minute

Projects we love them and we often get asked what are our top UX skills that we use regularly. So here are our top 7:


User Research:
Understanding user behaviour to gather valuable insights to inform on the design process.

Prototyping and Wireframing: Essential for communicating design ideas, helping to facilitate collaboration and testing.

Accessibility Design: Create Accessible digital products incorporating accessibility guidelines and practices. Design inclusive for all users.

Information Architecture: Navigation and content flow enhance user understanding and engagement.

Visual Design: Aesthetics visual design, color, typography, and layout to create interfaces that align with brand identity.

Usability Testing: Plan and conduct usability tests to make the right design decisions.

Analytics: User data is key. Use good analytics tools and there is no looking back.

For more about UX, or a no obligation consultation, please get in touch with us today on 07858110704, or email info@ixdlab.co.uk.

Our top five inspirational UX quotes

Posted by

Our top five inspirational UX quotes close
Article Reading Time: < 1 minute

Get inspired with some of our favourite UX quotations! We use them for brainstorming sessions, or for inspiration on projects in our consideration of how users feel, and use an interactive product.

 

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better. –

Jeff Bezos

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – 

Bill Gates

It takes no skills to make something crappy. Skills are only required to make something great. – Jared Spool, Founder at User Interface Engineering

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”Steve Jobs

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” –Albert Einstein

We are verified content creators with Brave Rewards using the Brave Browser. Brave Rewards allows you to choose, browse and reward content creators like ixdlab using BAT or other Cryptocurrency’s. If you find our content useful and like what you read please donate via downloading the Brave browser. The Brave Browser allows you to earn free BAT. We are currently trialling this type of crowdfunding for our Cryptocurrency research projects.

Chatbots
Working with Chattitude, ux’d Chatbot Design

Posted by

Working with Chattitude, ux’d Chatbot Design close
Article Reading Time: 3 minutes

Strange, strange things… At ixdlab_ we aren’t convinced that Chatbots can fully replace a trained human employee entirely.  We do believe they offer business added value in supporting out of hours contact, or brilliant for handling regular simple tasks like applying a flag to customer bank accounts that the customer is using a card in another country. They can be useful for answering customer queries on delivery dates for ordered goods, or to help identify and apply voucher savings on a range of products for promotional reasons. 

Building a Chatbot to successfully respond to every customers query isn’t without its challenges. Researchers currently predict that within the next five years 70 – 90% of customer queries will be successfully dealt with by Chatbots, the resulting cost saving making Chatbots worth considering. 

So how do you work out how to construct a useful and successful chatbot?

1. Work out what questions your customers ask on a frequent basis.

This could range from simple queries:

  • Delivery times
  • Shipping addresses 
  • Order status 
  • Onboarding 
  • Updates to pricing 
  • Discount

and simple tasks

  • Changing a PIN number 
  • Applying a discount to the right product 
  • Password resets 

2. Work out how many of the regular queries answered by your staff can be directed to the chatbot

Time savings for your staff answering customer contact queries and completing simple tasks can be measured over a typical day, week, or month. So if a member of staff regularly addresses the same queries in say the average industry time of 10 minutes for responding to a customer query with a specified time period then it is possible to benchmark the most common queries and work out an average cost of handling responses.

3.  Chatbots have problems recovering from incorrect input by customers or deviation off topic

Chatbots often work on linear scripts that have very specific steps. It’s better if the design of the Chatbot is far more flexible, and adaptive to identifying changes in request for what the Customer wants. This is not however without issue. Designing a Chatbot which can identify context of query is better than designing with a tightly scripted linear type script which is too inflexible to adapt to customer changes. Other ways to compensate for incorrect input is to show the Chatbots menu to the customer to help resolve a query.

Typos and indirect questions can also challenge the Chatbots responses. So make sure that a design compensates for these eventualities and has flexibility in the interpretation of contexts from the customers answers.

4. Sometimes understanding between customers and company Chatbot need a little help.

If all other routes to answer a customers query become too over complex. Provide alternative contact to the customer such as a phone number, access to a human being, or a reasonable alternative. 

5. Never hide the fact from the customer that they are conversing with a Chatbot 

Avoid the frustration of the customer by making it obvious that contact is with a Chatbot initially. If the customer of the chatbot cannot find the right answer put them in contact with an actual customer advisor, but advise the customer before you transfer the conversation. 

That by designing flexibility into a Chatbots scripts and into the design of its responses in context of a customers query can prove to be a valuable addition to your business strategy. Despite the problems with a Chatbots high interaction cost and the questions around spending more on a website or app to avoid the need for a Chatbot they still are useful for providing coverage 24/7 for simple queries and tasks. They can also lessen the distractions associated when a customer is making a purchase.
Chatbots have potential to improve on the return on investment for your company so that you and your staff can concentrate on the less mundane aspects of customer support. 

Improving User Experience with IXDLAB

At IXDLAB, we help the world’s top brands to create digital experiences that work for their users. From user research and design, to evaluation – our UX experts will ensure that your digital products are right for your audience.

For more about UX, or a no obligation consultation, please get in touch with us today on 07858110704, or email info@ixdlab.co.uk.

We are verified content creators with Brave Rewards using the Brave Browser. Brave Rewards allows you to choose, browse and reward content creators like ixdlab using BAT or other Cryptocurrency’s. If you find our content useful and like what you read please donate via downloading the Brave browser. The Brave Browser allows you to earn free BAT. We are currently trialling this type of crowdfunding for our Cryptocurrency research projects.