Evaluating user experience for startup founders

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

At some point in your life as an entrepreneur, you’re going to have to look at wireframes or mockups. Whether or not you’ve had a hand in crafting them, you’re going to be asked your opinion about them, which can be a daunting task at times. Ideally, you want to get your designs in front of users as quickly as possible. But there is going to be a time early on in products development where you need to make judgements about a design before you’re able to get it in front of your target users.

How do you know what a good user experience(UX) is, and how do you identify it in your mockups and prototypes? You’ve probably been looking at this project for a while now and knowing what it would look like to fresh eyes is not going to be possible. If you’re not careful, you’ll resort to nibbling around the edges of a design: making tiny tweaks about fonts or colours.

Those aesthetic details are important from a branding perspective, but aren’t going to make or break your app from an experience point of view. This article isn’t here to convince you the importance of UX, I’ll leave that to the fine folks at Forbes. What this article aims to do is to give you a few basic questions that will allow you to judge whether your app is providing a good user experience to your customers, hopefully before you find out the hard way in production. They key to thinking about UX is to think about it as communication, that is, what is your app saying to your customers.

Here are questions you can ask yourself (or your designer) to figure out whether you’re giving your users the best experience:

What’s the most obvious thing to do on this screen?

Let’s try a little exercise. Open your phone and open up an app, any app, and look at whatever screen you’re on for two seconds (make sure to count them). Then close the app.

Now that you’ve done that, name all the things that you could do on that page. Don’t list the buttons or headers. Name the specific actions you can take. Things like: login, make a post, edit your account. Now look back to that same screen and count all the things that you can actually do on that screen. Chances are, you missed a few things, which is fine if those things aren’t something that you…