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Product design

The Power of UX: Examples How UX Design Can Solve Business Challenges

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The success of any digital solution, from a small niche app to a platform serving millions, depends on how well it meets users’ needs. And those needs are often not as obvious as they may seem. For instance, an unclear menu button or a redundant interface element, may cause users’ friction, confusion, or cognitive overload. Eventually, such design flaws may lead to decrease of the most critical business metrics. 

Luckily, there is a superhero that can save the day – UX design. It shapes user behavior and addresses any kind of issues that occur during user-product interactions. We at Eleken have rich experience working with different SaaS products, so we know the importance of user experience in a battle against various business challenges. Keep reading to explore the power of UX.

The importance of UX design for business

As we mentioned, UX design influences business metrics. But how? We’ll discuss it in details in a bit, and for now, we’ll say that design influences users’ feelings regarding your product, whether it makes them happy or frustrated. Users’ feelings, in turn, affect how your product performs from the business point of view. If a particular aspect of your product doesn’t perform well, the reason is likely hiding somewhere in the user experience. 

With this in mind, let’s see why UX is so effective when solving various business challenges.  

UX considers users’ psychology

When interacting with a product, people perceive it on different levels. Even if the app or platform seems completely relevant to their goals, they may struggle while using it. One of the key roles of UX design is to handle cognitive biases and take into account every aspect of the user experience. It helps avoid components that may cause cognitive overload or lack of accessibility. To achieve this goal, designers dive deep into the audience’s specifics and find a way to deliver as relevant user journeys as possible. 

UX relies on data

UX solutions are based on the results of qualitative and quantitative surveys rather than theories and assumptions. Thanks to comprehensive user research, a product team studies the audience’s needs and the market’s specifics. User interviews, field studies, A/B testing, and other methodologies allow designers to detect and analyze numerous aspects of user-product interactions. 

UX directly impacts business metrics

UX design directly affects metrics that are critical for a SaaS business’s success. To name a few, these are conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), net performer score (NPS), churn rate, and many more. Thanks to proper UX solutions, a business can improve the product’s value for customers, encourage them to recommend a service or platform, and overcome churn. 

This makes the ROI of UX really outstanding. According to a Forrester survey, every dollar invested in UX may return your business up to 100 dollars, while the conversion rate can increase by 400% thanks to proper UI/UX solutions. 

UX simplifies complex things

The advantages of UX design described above are just the tip of the iceberg. The most complex digital product’s rely on user experience design to make their solutions accessible to users. For example, a freight tendering platform that connects shippers and carriers through RFI is a solution for the logistics industry. Sounds a bit complicated?

Pay attention how a well-designed minimalistic sidebar navigation can simplify the complex product’s navigation:

Sidebar

Read the whole story of TendrX logistics platform UX/UI design made by Eleken. 

And now, let’s talk about several most common challenges companies can overcome with relevant UX solutions. 

Business problems that can be solved with UX

The following problems are very common for modern digital products. Here is how businesses can solve them with the help of UX design. 

1. Low conversion rates

Conversion rate is one of the essential metrics for SaaS companies. And many of them struggle to find the right solution to convert more free trial users into paid subscribers. Even if the idea behind an app or platform is great, it may seem blurry at first, so newcomers often fail to realize the value of the product and leave it. Besides, people may need help learning how it all works and how to use it. 

The solution to this issue good onboarding experience. UX designers use different methods and tactics to determine how to introduce a product to potential customers, explain its core features, and communicate its value as early as possible. Normally, designers turn to specific UX onboarding patterns. If implemented properly, these techniques eliminate friction at the beginning of users’ journeys and allow businesses to convert visitors into customers. 

UX power

2. Unclear product positioning

When a potential customer bumps into a landing page or first launches an app, they need to get answers to two main questions:

  • Where am I?
  • What should I do next?

If your product fails to answer these questions immediately, a visitor will likely leave it for good. And that is another issue that can be fixed with the help of UX. 

Here, we should go back to users’ essential psychological needs. One of the most common mistakes that lead to losing customers’ trust and result in higher churn is the ambiguity effect. This cognitive bias confuses people because they don’t understand where they are and what they are supposed to do. As a result, it’s easier for them to leave than to keep looking for answers. 

UX solves this issue by instantly and clearly answering these two critical questions. This effect can be achieved with UX readability, minimalistic and intuitive interface, smooth navigation, and clear call-to-action buttons. Besides, the design for simplicity often relies on consistent content positioning and helpful visual clues (icons, contrasting colors, clear interface architecture, and so on). 

UX power

3. Inconsistency

For a successful SaaS company, constant growth is vital, as well as gradual changes in its design requirements. At some point, you may notice that your digital products, landing pages, websites, and even social media channels are inconsistent and do not match each other in many aspects. This challenge may not seem critical at first, but eventually, this inconsistency may confuse users and make your product design irrelevant to your current business objectives. 

But what are the benefits of UX design in this situation? Let’s have a closer look. 

After a comprehensive UX audit that reveals design flaws and mismatches throughout all components of your product,  designers can help you come up with the most relevant solutions depending on your very case. Apart from ensuring better consistency, the design changes have an immediate impact on how customers perceive your product. Any element of an application or website, from button color to image style and font size, may completely transform the way your product looks and feels. 

UX power

4. Lack of customization and personalization

Personalization is a result-driven technique that allows companies to deliver more relevant experiences within digital products aimed at individual user needs. Customization, in turn, provides users with more freedom and control over interfaces when interacting with apps or platforms. Both methods allow you to deliver the content people strive to get, ensure helpful recommendations based on customers’ personal preferences, and boost the audience’s trust in your brand. As stated by the McKinsey research, making your solutions more personalized increases your revenue by nearly 40%

However, personalization and customization should be implemented wisely. Otherwise, these powerful techniques may turn into a burden for end-users, resulting in even more business challenges. The goal of UX design here is to provide the right balance and make sure that personalized content is not getting boring, redundant, or unhelpful. 

UX power

5. Irrelevant data and insights

Every company uses different tools to collect data about their customers’ expectations and product performance. However, the solutions like Google Analytics are often not enough to provide a clear view of what challenges your end-users face with your app. As a consequence, you may lack an understanding of your target audience and their current needs. To fill those gaps, you can turn to detailed UX research

UX designers use various techniques to learn more about your customers, including user interviews and field studies. For instance, A/B testing can overcome numerous business challenges. Keeping the most crucial metrics in mind, you can run such tests based on your product team’s hypotheses regarding potential improvements. Target users will pick what they prefer, allowing you to gather useful feedback and keep your solutions relevant to the current business requirements.    

UX power

Now that you know why UX design is important when it comes to eliminating various business problems, let’s take a look at a couple of real-life examples. 

Examples of UX solutions that helped address business challenges

The following cases prove that finding the right UX solution can save the day for SaaS companies and their customers. Although each of these problems had a different cause and nature, both of them were tackled thanks to the right decisions made by product design teams.

1. Netflix: the paradox of choice

We all know Netflix is the king in the world of media streaming. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no issues affecting the user experiences of Netflix subscribers. 

The challenge: According to recent reports, one of the most significant problems faced by millions of Netflix users is the paradox of choice. This issue occurs when a person has too many options to choose from. As a result, people spend too much time trying to make the right decision. In the case of Netflix, the paradox of choice has become a major challenge.

Netflix

Since this streaming platform offers thousands of movies and series to pick from, users often feel stressed as they waste time looking for something they would like to watch.

UX solutions: Netflix has spent lots of money and effort trying to tackle the paradox of choice issue. They conducted numerous surveys and tested various solutions to provide more effective personalized recommendations, helping users spend less time browsing. 

Here are several potential UX solutions that may address this business challenge faced by Netflix and many similar subscription-based media services. 

  • Shuffle Play feature. Many viewers appreciate services that start playing a random movie or TV show episode once they enable it. This trick allows busy users to save time when choosing from dozens of options. 
  • Enhanced personalization. Services like Netflix constantly improve their approach to personalized content. Movie recommendations are based on users’ previous choices which makes the experience more personalized. 
  • Recommendations based on feedback. Rating systems are similar to the world-of-mouth effect as other users’ feedback (even if it’s not a full review, but a number of stars evaluating certain content) plays a crucial role in decision-making. 

2. Gridle: improving the onboarding experience

One of the key business challenges to overcome is retaining potential customers that tend to churn if the platform doesn’t convince them to stay. In particular, Gridle, a client management platform for business owners, faced this problem and started looking for an effective solution to handle it. 

The challenge:  One of the issues of Gridle platform was that many users were leaving the app without taking the expected steps that would seamlessly guide them to the bottom line. The company turned to Eleken for platform redesign . One of our main goals was to help Gridle increase the conversion rate by improving the user experience. 

UX solutions: The problem of low conversion rate is often caused by an ineffective, unclear, or irrelevant onboarding process. The Eleken team analyzed the onboarding process of the existing platform, and implemented an effective UX strategy to reduce friction by making Gridle’s user onboarding clear and concise. Here are the key solutions we came up with. 

  • Signup process. Users can quickly go through registration since they don’t need to fill out numerous forms. The signup process takes just a few simple steps.
  • First in-app experience. The onboarding process instantly introduces the app’s core features and explains how to complete the essential tasks, such as adding a new customer and importing customer data to the platform. 
Gridle
  • Product tour. We turned to Intercom’s product tours that help users quickly learn the interface. This decision saved time and effort for developers since they didn’t have to implement custom onboarding. 

All these solutions streamline the onboarding process, improving the bottom line and smoothly guiding newcomers through the product. Gridle’s customers loved the new modern and user-friendly design which positively influenced the business and boosted growth. 

Conclusion

When customers interact with a digital product, every single point of their journeys matters. That is why UX is important for business. If people experience confusion, frustration, or lack of concentration, the problem probably hides somewhere in the product’s design. And that is where you need UI/UX design services

We at Eleken know how to use the power of UX as an effective tool against various challenges. We conduct user research, create personas, and build user flows to understand what customers actually strive to get and design a product that meets those goals. Need a solution for your business? Contact us!

Mariia Kasym

Author

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Product design
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0
min read

All Secret Ingredients of Good UI in 7 eLearning Interface Design Examples

Interface designer is a fairy godmother of your eLearning application. They can make it simpler to use, more engaging, and more suitable to the context. 

But unless UI is done right, your interface carriage may turn into a pumpkin even before the clock strikes midnight. To make sure it doesn't come to that, let’s learn from the best eLearning interface designs.

interface design meme


You're about to see some examples of eLearning platform design — award-winning ones, ones that you’ll recognize as soon as you set eyes on them, and ones that you’ve never seen before. 

Those examples are here not only for you to pull some inspiration from. Each of them represents some general principles of user interface design, and some ways you can go about creating your own educational application. 

Later in this article, we’ll explore applications designed to look good at any device and those that enhance user engagement. But first, let’s look at user interface design examples that add to learning applications’ usability.

UI design can improve the learning experience

Throwing too much info at your readers at once is a good way to drive them into overload. Luckily, a masterful UI can turn any bunch of content into a simple minimalistic app. Let me show you how it works with our first example of an eLearning system.

TypingClub design for maintaining focus

TypingClub is an online touch typing course that works really hard to minimize all the information unrelated to the lesson. The app controls dissolve as soon as a student starts typing to appear only when a mission is accomplished. They are minimized to a tiny menu button in the top left corner and a few icons in the top right one.

TypeClub's minimalistic interface

Such a minimalistic interface has a calming effect on the viewer. It allows the learner to focus. It promotes clarity. But white spaces shouldn’t entirely replace controls, orientation signs and visual cues — otherwise, users would fail to find the needed spot in your app.

iSpring Learn presents navigation and orientation best practices

When students struggle to orient themselves inside eLearning courses, it’s a design problem. Because students should use their cognitive capacity for learning their lesson rather than learning how to use your application.

Below, you can see a screenshot from the iSpring learning management system that shows how one of the eLearning industry leaders ensures successful customer journeys.

lms ux rules: Orientation example
iSpring Learn shows how to design LMS

To help users orient within a course, iSpring shows all the topics on the right. To navigate within each topic, you have a bottom menu that allows you to start or stop, move forward or backward, or return to the main menu.


If you want more details about LMS design, we highly recommend you check out our LMS UX design rules article.

Duolingo masters bite-sized learning content

With over 150 million users registered around the world, Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning apps on the market today. It takes a gamification approach to education, it takes eLearning graphic design to a whole new level, it became a meme after all.

You can't say "Duolingo" without showing one of those legendary Duolingo memes

All of this makes Duolingo the perfect candidate for us to explore learning interface design. But let us draw attention to the feature that hides behind Duolingo’s bright graphics, points, and badges. It’s Duolingo’s bite-sized content.

When signing up for Duolingo, you can choose between learning for 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes a day — and the app will provide you with snackable lessons that fit that time gap. 

Duolingo user interface
Image credit: usabilitygeek.com

Such eLearning architecture design makes perfect sense. Microlearning fits perfectly into the natural flow of users’ workday with its little time spans and tiny smartphone screens. Such short pieces of content work in favor of learning on the go. You can learn a lesson while staying at a bus stop or waiting in a queue for a morning coffee. 

User interface design can make your app look good on all devices

Responsive eLearning design sounds like a good idea, since learners will use whatever devices they have to access their training. However, squeezing a web course to mobile, or mobile learning course to VR triggers some non-obvious design challenges.

PublishXI LMS and its mobile UI eLearning approach

On the web, we control the interface with clicks and mouse scrolling. On mobile devices it’s not the case — the layout should allow one to finger-scroll, zoom, or pinch the screen. That’s why you can’t easily adapt desktop interfaces to mobile.

When we at Eleken created mobile and web apps for the PublishXI learning management system, we designed two different apps for two different devices. 

LMS design for PublishXI

For instance, given that most people navigate on their phones with a single hand, we put mobile navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen and made them large enough for users to tap with their thumb.

VR eLearning presented by LabTrainingVR Biosafety Cabinet 

Education in a 360-degree interactive environment is by default much more exciting than just sitting in a classroom listening to some dude spelling things. Like, students can experience first-hand the life of an Ancient Greek artisan instead of visiting a museum or virtually travel to the Easter Island statues instead of just looking for Polynesia on a map.

However, virtual reality is a very specific medium that lives by its own rules, differing from those for web and mobile design. In web design, for instance, we have a series of tricks to make functionality obvious for users. Like, a pointer icon that changes to a hand icon every time you point the mouse cursor on something clickable on the web. How would the same work for VR?

The LabTrainingVR course was created for public health laboratory professionals, to help them apply knowledge and practice setting up a biological safety cabinet. This virtual lab shows how the principle of discoverability can be applied to virtual reality technology:

  • Proximity implies a relationship with objects.
  • Objects available for manipulation are large and easy to select. They have bright colors, as compared to light monotonous backgrounds.
  • The highlight around the selected objects works as a cue to show what items can be manipulated.

UI has the power to enhance user engagement

eLearning UX design services can offer scenarios, branching, storytelling, gaming, assessments, and more to inspire instructional design. Here we have examples of such engagement techniques well implemented.

Sololearn and its engagement triggers 

Learner engagement triggers, also known as gamification, are a popular way to increase user motivation and retention. Sololearn is the world's largest community of people learning to code, and it has a full set of gamification mechanics such as challenges, badges, rankings and progress bars. Let’s take a look at them.

Sololearn gamification: challenges, achievements, leaderboard. Image credit: riseapps.co

Thanks to its community-driven engagement techniques, Sololearn has grown by word of mouth to 21 million registered users in 12 months. Its gamification is so good it makes learning addictive for some users.

sololearn gamification meme
You are not alone, Jewel

Shady Sam presents the very essence of eLearning gamification

Congratulations! You have been hired by Shady Sam, and your job is to rip hard-working Americans off by providing questionable loans with hidden interest rates. Work diligently, and you’ll get cool stuff for your desk.

That’s the story told by Shady Sam, a browser game from Mckinney designed to demonstrate how loan terms can hurt you, if you don’t pay attention.

Instead of listening to a boring lecture about mortgage and interest rates, users take the role of a loan shark. Trying to trick others in the game, players easily understand the logic behind such tricks. 

This learning app was created according to all gamification best practices:

  • It offers a simplified, easy to grasp model of a complex financial system.
  • It makes players take on a new role and make decisions in that role. Namely, users learn by simulating new experiences. 
  • Finally, the game immerses players into the new world and makes people take their lessons seriously.

Interested in gamification techniques? We have a dedicated article about how to use gamification in eLearning.

So how to design an eLearning platform?

Now that you are inspired by some awesome learning examples, time to move to the next level. User experience is the backbone of any application, so we recommend checking out our guide to UX strategy so that you can build the foundation of your eLearning project.

If you’re looking for designers to implement your ideas, you may find the article on how to build a design team useful.

Need a bit more information about UI and UX? Read our comprehensive product design article. Or better get in touch with Eleken designers. We’d be happy to help.


Product design
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0
min read

How Much Personalization Is Enough in UX Design?

According to a recent Forrester survey, 77% of customers prioritize companies that provide a personalized user experience or service. And the fact that more and more businesses strive to enhance personalized UX isn’t surprising at all.

Personalization and customization are efficient UX techniques that help users avoid generic and unnecessary content. Instead, they provide people with more relevant, up-to-date, and individualized experiences. At least, that’s what they say. 

In many cases, however, personalization causes additional challenges for end-users, making people feel frustrated about their experiences as they find the content irrelevant, redundant, or unhelpful. Moreover, too much personalization can make users think that a service compromises their privacy, making them leave as fast as possible.

We at Eleken constantly provide effective UX solutions that address users’ needs. And we know exactly how to keep the right balance when applying customization and personalization in product design. In this article, we are going to share these insights with you. But let’s define the basics first. 

What is personalization in UX design?

Personalization allows UX designers to create user journeys that meet customers’ unique requirements and deliver experiences based on their individual needs. If we say that the product or service is personalized, we mean that it predicts users’ expectations and is tailored to their goals. This makes design solutions more helpful, engaging, and easier to perceive. 

Many confuse personalization and customization, believing that these terms have the same meaning. However, there is a significant difference between them.

  • Personalization is when UX elements based on customer data address the individual needs of each user. 
  • Customization allows users to adjust UX elements to their individual needs on their own.

Learn more about personalization and customization in UX design in our blog post.

Now, let’s explore how different types of digital products personalize and customize user experiences. 

Who takes advantage of UX personalization and customization?

Most commonly, UX personalization is used in e-commerce apps, streaming services, and social media platforms. Here are three typical examples of a personalized user experience in these types of digital products. 

  • E-commerce apps. For example, Amazon uses a machine learning service, Amazon Personalize, to help e-commerce stores create individual recommendations for their customers. It combines and analyzes user interactions, user metadata, and item metadata to generate the most relevant offers for online shoppers.
  • Streaming services. The entire user interface of such platforms is built around individual user preferences. For example, Netflix has adopted a personalized movie recommendation system that predicts how much a person would like to watch a movie depending on a member's previous activity. 
Image source: Netflix
  • Social media. Have you ever noticed that Facebook (or Meta, as they call it today) delivers only specific content to your feed, something you were recently looking for? That’s because the platform collects data about each user to create customized experiences, including ads, news, and so on.
Image source: Meta

These are just a few personalization UX examples in modern digital solutions. More and more products turn to personalization and customization. Individual recommendations and helpful notifications are great when it comes to making digital products engaging.

At this point, it may seem that the more personalized UX is, the more users will convert into loyal customers. However, this is not always the case. Too much personalization may have the opposite effect and here’s why. 

When does personalization turn into overpersonalization?

It’s pretty obvious why personalization matters in UX user experience. It allows products to deliver more relevant, and valuable content. Customization provides users with freedom and enables them to adjust interfaces to their own requirements. But will these benefits become even more significant if you increase personalization and customization in your product’s UX design? 

Well… not really. In fact, the line between enough and too much is quite thin here. At some point, a customer will likely find this “extra personalization” boring, overwhelming, or even creepy.

According to comprehensive research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, too much personalization in UX leads to a lack of diversity, content fatigue, and homogeneous user experiences. As a result a product fails to deliver the content users actually strive to receive. 

That is why UX designers should be careful when implementing personalization and customization. Here are the most significant pitfalls we always keep in mind when turning to these solutions in our designs. 

Main issues caused by too much personalization and customization

Let’s take a closer look at the most common personalization and customization challenges and consider their negative impact on user experiences. 

Lack of diversity

When trying to provide users with as relevant content as possible, a product may feel strictly limited to users’ core interests. As a result, it lacks diversity because of missing out on a broader range of content that could potentially interest users. In this case, focusing on a single preference of an individual user prevents an organization from learning more about their target audience and delivering more diverse content that would still be based on their needs. 

For example, imagine an app allowing users to browse images. If a person is interested in funny cat pictures, overpersonalized recommendations will provide them with hundreds of those. However, this approach also limits their access to other types of content. But what if this person would also love to see dogs and bunnies in their feed? That is where overpersonalization becomes a problem both for the organization and end-users:

  • Organizations lack an understanding of individual user needs
  • End-users will eventually get tired of the same-looking content

Homogenous experience

In the same research we mentioned above, NN Group describes one of the most critical impacts of overpersonalization as a homogenous experience. This survey showed that the participants quickly get bored when viewing the same content on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Besides, they experienced the same feelings when receiving similar product offerings on Amazon. In particular, users complained about outdated recommendations based on their previous purchases. ​

The outcome of this issue is quite frustrating. According to NN Group’s report, “In some cases, this level of overpersonalization has caused users to lose interest in these platforms or abandon them altogether.” 

Placing users into a narrow audience group limits their freedom. So instead of pleasing people with attention to their individual interests, personalization becomes annoying if not implemented wisely. 

Content redundancy

Content homogeneity is also related to another common personalization issue. Users may find the targeted content not just boring, but redundant if it is duplicated, especially in cases when the person bumps into identical (or very similar) posts, ads, or recommended goods lots of times. 

This effect is also caused by overpersonalization that occurs when a system considers a particular type of content a user’s primary interest. However, many people prefer avoiding such duplicates and having unique online experiences.  

One of the most common examples of content redundancy is the Instagram feed . People, when following certain trends, make tons of similar pictures. There’s even an @insta_repeat account that points out this phenomenon. It shows multiple similar posts made by different users at different times, and they are just identical.

Image source: @insta_repeat

While being a bit annoying on social media channels, redundant content is a main deal-breaker when it comes to ads. MarketingWeek reports that nearly half (45%) of customers abandon brands that repeatedly show the same advertisement or creative messaging. As you can see, personalization doesn’t help here. 

“Creepy effect” of personalization

It’s not a secret that personalization and customization are based on data that organizations collect about users. However, people don’t tend to think about that when these methods work properly, providing them with helpful and relevant experiences. In contrast, if overpersonalization occurs, users may find it not just excessive, but creepy. 

In other words, if a user takes a single action that snowballs into receiving tons of related content, they will likely get worried about their privacy. 

In particular, many users consider personalization creepy if they don’t understand how certain information was gathered. For instance, let’s say a person searched for cosmetics from their phone on a specific website and then started to receive related recommendations on another website when using a laptop. In this case, a user won’t understand how their data was processed and used, which leads to anxiety and mistrust.

Besides, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that certain information is sensitive. Personalized content based on such data should not come to a user out of blue. Good UX should consider this factor when applying personalization and avoid misusing private information (from pregnancy and medical issues to the need for psychological help or addiction treatment, and so on). 

Cognitive overload caused by overcustomization

All cases described above definitely prove that too much personalization causes many challenges for end-users. But what about customization? Could it be too much? 

Well, too much of something is never a good thing. Customization provides users with more freedom and control over interfaces. However, at some point, this freedom causes so-called cognitive overload

According to numerous studies, users don’t want to think too much and develop their expertise sky-high when interacting with digital products. Instead, they want to get a design that issimple, intuitive, and result-driven. So while customizing certain features to users’ individual needs sounds cool, asking users to set every single aspect of a digital solution on their own is not a good idea. In fact, overсustomization causes friction, requires too much learning, and may even question the value of the product.

Now that you know all the potential pitfalls and misuses of personalization and customization, let’s explore how to make these solutions work as intended. Here are the most effective ways to avoid overpersonalization and overcustomization in user experience. 

How to prevent overpersonalization and overcustomization

When designing an app or platform, a product team should find the right approach to implementing personalization and customization. Of course, the need for these UX techniques entirely depends on the product’s specifics, such as its type and the target audience it’s supposed to serve. 

However, there are several best practices we at Eleken recommend following to avoid unwanted friction. Let’s look at them in more detail.

  • Find the right balance. To avoid the lack of content diversity caused by overpersonalization, find a way to consider users’ individual needs while still delivering various content. For example, Pinterest allows users to add more categories to their primary interests, this way expanding their feed if they like. 
  • Combine targeted and general content. Users who can access only personalized content may quickly feel bored with a product. It’s better to mix different types of content and allow users to discover new information or goods, even if it’s not based on their inital interests or previous purchases. 
  • Be careful with potentially sensitive information. Users value their privacy, especially when it comes to sensitive data. Providing personalized recommendations based on such information should not be out of a relevant context. Otherwise, personalization may seem creepy or even hurt users’ feelings.
  • Provide users with control. Users should be able to control and manage personalization applied by the products they use. Such an approach builds trust because it allows people to establish the level of their privacy on their own. Moreover, users will not be scared away if they understand how the personalization algorithm works.
  • Take advantage of user feedback. If users face any kind of issues related to personalization or customization within a product, they should be able to report those problems. This will allow you to improve the user experience and prevent potential churn.
  • Don’t let users’ freedom affect their comfort. The level of customization should be limited to people’s actual needs. Provide users with control over the interface only when it’s relevant and helpful. Avoid abusing custom features, as they may overwhelm users and make your platform less intuitive. 

When personalization and customization work properly

As with any other aspect of UX, personalization and customization are effective only if applied wisely. If used too much, they may damage user experience and cause problems instead of solving them. These issues lead to higher churn rates which is critical for a SaaS customer journey. That is why we at Eleken always pay extra attention to the level of personalization and customization in our designs. 

For example, when working on the Acadeum, a platform selling courses for universities. We got the right balance in terms of customization and personalization in our UX strategy. Check out how we implemented it here: 

  • Personalized content based on the user's individual choices. During the onboarding process, newcomers go through a brief interview that allows the system to determine which courses fit their needs best. As a result, users get the most relevant recommendations later on. 
  • Personalization based on user roles. Personalized content depends on the roles that users select on their own. Every role accesses information that fits its needs most. 
  • Well-balanced customization. Users can customize certain interface elements, including the background color and typography. However, the customization level doesn’t go too far. The app remains simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate. 

Moreover, if users don’t need to customize the interface, they can turn to the default themes and quickly pick the most suitable one. 

Without overwhelming users, Eleken designers created a more personalized, individual design for the online learning digital product. For more insights, read the case study

Final thoughts

Personalization and customization work great only when carefully thought through. Product teams have to find the right balance when implementing these solutions in their designs. Overpersonalization may seem stereotypical, making content boring and generic and in some cases, it also makes users feel they’re being stalked. Too much customization, in turn, overwhelms users. Instead of creating a sense of freedom and control, it limits their interactions with the product and doesn’t meet the principles of accessibility in UX

That is why when building digital products, it’s worth avoiding overpersonalized UX, as well as too customizable interfaces. And only an experienced design agency can handle this challenge. Looking for such professionals? We at Eleken are ready to help you out! Our UX design experts will make sure the user experience of your product is well-balanced and meets your users’ needs. Get in touch, and we will find the most effective design solutions for your project.

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