Enhancing User Narratives for Effective UX Storytelling

In some cases, an unsatisfactory or annoying experience may still lead to repeat visits and purchases, particularly in industries with loyalty programs and high switching costs. So, is it worth it for designers to invest time and effort in creating delightful experiences? To answer this, we must first understand how user needs shape the overall user experience.

When you think of "delightful UX," what comes to mind? Eye-catching animations, witty text, charming mascots, or aesthetically pleasing design? While these superficial elements contribute to delight, true delight encompasses more profound attributes often overlooked.

In this article, we explore the concept of user delight, differentiating between superficial and deep delight, and discuss whether it is worth pursuing.

User delight refers to the positive emotional response a user has while interacting with a device or interface. Although it may not be outwardly expressed, it can influence thoughts and behaviours during website or application use. Identifying delight can be challenging since it's sometimes verbalized, making it difficult to determine what genuinely makes a user experience satisfying.

Understanding the hierarchy of user needs is crucial in answering whether creating delight is a worthy goal for designers. Inspired by Maslow's hierarchy, Aarron Walter's Designing for Emotion suggests that users' higher needs, like pleasure and wonder, can only be satisfied once basic needs like functionality and usability are met.

There are two types of delight users experience when interacting with an interface: surface and deep.

Surface delight is derived from isolated interface features, often gimmicky, and can be tacky if the underlying product needs to be revised. These features have come to symbolise delightful interfaces, but more delight in these elements is required.

Deep delight arises from a holistic engagement with a site, achieved when all user needs, including functionality, reliability, usability, and pleasure, are met. Deep engagement occurs in a state of flow and is challenging to accomplish.

Achieving deep delight requires a streamlined workflow, minimised pain points, and an exceptional user experience. While more flashy than surface delight, establishing this foundation is critical before pursuing surface delight, as neglecting the user experience can lead to wasted time and resources.

While deep delight might seem like the holy grail of interfaces, a few sites successfully achieve this; Yelp, providing user reviews for businesses and services, and Unroll, me, streamlining the email subscription management process, are prime examples.

Prioritising delight creation is crucial. However, if a product lacks basic functionality or reliability, delightful features won't deliver lasting benefits. Ensuring good usability is vital.

Designers aim for visually pleasing interfaces to boost user engagement, but when usability issues still need to be addressed, interfaces fail to elicit the desired response. Advertising with forced surface delight can be risky, as it may appear inauthentic and untrustworthy for certain companies.

In conclusion, design teams should focus on the overall experience rather than prioritising surface delight for tangible payoffs. If a product is functional, reliable, and usable but lacks appeal, it might be worth reconsidering design goals.

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The objective of Analytics is to understand how users navigate from one page to another and the duration they spend on each page. Each column's nodes are organized by traffic volume, with the most visited node at the top. The number of users who exited the site or application is noted at the bottom of each column. Links connecting each node to the next viewed node are also present, with the link's width reflecting the number of users who navigated between those nodes. By observing the link's width, popular pathways can be easily identified.

Analytics can provide insights into the content users interact with before making significant actions, alert us about potential issues, and reveal patterns of common navigation routes. However, journey mapping necessitates more information than analytics alone can offer. Analytics cannot tell the unique goals or expectations of each user, nor can it provide the qualitative details such as thoughts and feelings that make journey mapping so insightful. Nevertheless, analytics is essential in understanding typical user journeys.

A Sankey diagram provides a visual representation of the most common routes through a product or application, indicating where most users initiate and the screens (or even features) they move to next. Sankey diagrams visualize the relationship between nodes (pages, screens, or feature use) and the traffic flow between them. The width of the link signifies the volume of traffic between those nodes.

Sankey diagrams appear complex, but they are pretty straightforward. Each column in the Sankey diagram represents a step in the process, with nodes appearing in consecutive columns. Nodes in each column are listed based on the traffic they attract, with the most visited one at the top. Dropoffs (users who exit the site or application) are noted at the bottom of each column. Each node has links leading to the next viewed node, with the link's width indicating the number of users that moved between those nodes. Popular routes can be easily identified by observing the width of the association.

There are four main limitations to analytics-based paths. These diagrams aggregate various traffic data, and while they allow for the examination of individual user sessions, their primary function is to provide large-scale data. They highlight trends rather than individual user movements through the website. They present the most common initial and subsequent steps, aggregating users with different intentions, goals, and information needs. They do not represent actual user journeys because they cannot segment this traffic based on the user's interests.

However, the following tips can facilitate a proper interpretation of analytics-based paths:
Filter the flow data: Flow diagrams can be overwhelming as they present a lot of information. It is advisable to filter down this information into manageable chunks. You can start with a critical page or screen and focus on the traffic flowing through it. It's also worthwhile to filter this information by user categories, for example, mobile vs desktop users or those who completed significant actions.

Review key touchpoints: Pay particular attention to your internal pages where users form their first impressions. If any of these pages have a higher dropout rate, there might be a problem with the content.

Identify hub pages: These nodes act as a navigation, with a lot of traffic coming in and going out. This pattern could be a sign of either high engagement and pleasant exploration or a frustrating user experience.

Start from the end of the flow: Begin from a key objective you wish users to reach, then figure out how users get that goal by working backwards. This approach can tell you whether content supportive of conversion is visible and compelling to power users.

In conclusion, user paths serve as an exploratory tool for understanding how users navigate a site. While they help understand user behaviour, they are not a replacement for qualitative research that seeks to understand users' thoughts, feelings, and expectations as they use a product. User paths provide valuable insights, but they should be combined with qualitative research methods to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the user experience. To learn more about how user-path reports can inform UX work, consider enrolling in a full-day course on Analytics & User Experience. By leveraging analytics and qualitative research, you can better understand your users' journeys and optimize their experience with your website or application.

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