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In simple words, usability represents the quality of a product and how easily and safely a customer can use it. The usability of a product or website also depends on the effectiveness of the task that customers perform. Can they keep making product purchases through a website with a seamless checkout process? Does the usability of the website improve the customer experience in the process?
The more beneficial your customers find your product, website, or service, the higher chances that the customers will keep coming back. Besides, if you don’t find a product useful despite its description and extensive details, will you use the product again? Of course, that is the rule of usability. The only way to improve usability and customer retention side by side is to improve the customer experience. Here’s how usability keeps customers coming back.
User testing and usability testing
Both types of testing fall into a broader category of user experience research and design. Experts recommend that you should never stop testing your products at any stage of the process of development. While it ensures quality at every step, it also helps to improve the customer experience. Since usability is integral to how customers perceive your product and enjoy an experience, usability testing improves the product to the level that the customers need.
When you test your website or mobile phone applications with real users and potential customers, you realize the needs and wants of the customers. You learn what they want from the website or mobile applications and what your products lack or need to modify. Hence, this presents an opportunity for improvement.
Streamline your products
Whether you design a website or a mobile application, the best way to retain customers is to enhance their experience. Streamline your products to offer a better sense of use. Keeping a website and mobile application simple is the way many successful businesses chose in the past and continue to do so. When there isn’t too much information, customers find a product easy to use. Hence, if you make your products complex and hard to deal with, it will result in a poor customer experience. This is the main cause why some businesses find it hard to retain their customers or create a loyal customer base.
Make your product appealing
While it may sound like a less important factor, you must take note of what your product represents. Does it represent your company? Does it have the right logo? Plus, does it imitate the image of your business? These small points of connectivity engage the customers in a slightly different manner. When customers find a product such as a website and mobile application appealing, they tend to go back to it more and more. The aesthetics of the product is one of the many ways you can improve usability for your customers and thus, lead to higher customer retention.
Conclusion
Do you find it difficult to cope with the growing demand of customers of your business? User experience research can help you identify all the basic and unique demands of the customers of your business and others. This way, you can focus on your target audience, develop products for them, and work to increase the usability for a higher user experience. Note, it isn’t a one-day task. Progress takes time, and the same is the case with usability and user experience. Slow and gradual yet effective changes can keep the customers coming back.