User experience is the experience people have when engaging with a product or service. The focal point is understanding the requirements expected and needed by the user, with the intent of improving the overall quality of the interaction. This includes a website, mobile application, desktop software and basically any form of human/device interaction.

In order to provide good UX, the designer must have a deep understanding of the intended users values, abilities and limitations in order to produce a product or service that has value to its intended user group. Peter Morville best describes this through his User Experience Honeycomb diagram, which demonstrates the 6 most important qualities to consider for a user to have a meaningful and valuable experience; useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible and credible in order for it to be valuable.

Why is UX important?

“User experience is important because it tries to fulfil the user’s needs. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep a user loyal to the product or brand. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define customer journeys on your product that are most conducive to business success.”

• UX tries to fulfil the user’s needs and builds a better customer satisfaction–conversion–retention journey.
• UX aims to provide positive experiences to the user that keeps them loyal to the product or brand.
• UX defines customer journeys on your product and establishes a two-way relationship between the maker and the user.
• UX reduces costs for development/bug fixing/marketing and so on.
• UX provides improved return on investment (ROI)
• Sometimes the product doesn’t need to be innovative. It simply takes the usual idea and represents it differently. The user-focused design makes the product stand out.
• UX helps provide intuitive experience, coherence & continuity and platform-specific designs.

Therefore when we consider the importance of UX within our healthcare services, we quickly realise the level of impact it has in all areas. We cannot control the experience someone has within the healthcare environment as this is influenced by their own personal knowledge and past experiences. However, we can influence their experience through design.

User experience is different for everyone. Therefore the most important thing to keep in mind when designing a product is that you might not be the intended user who will use the product so you cannot assume what a user wants or what they need.

That is why talking to you intended target market is a key step in UX as feedback and input from these users will help guide and remove personal bias from the design process. The best process is to identify and understanding your user’s pain points i.e. the problem before considering a solution. We can do this by asking ourselves a series of questions: