Head of RTÉ.ie Neil Leyden chaired a discussion on The Importance of Experience on day two of the Dublin Tech Summit.
The discussion covered how user experience is the most vital aspect of bringing traffic to a site and keeping the consumers satisfied.
Founder and CEO of Arrays, Christian Marc Schmidt, highlighted taxi company Uber as a prime example of users being satisfied with their app due to attention to detail.
"...Even the redesigned Uber app with the little icons they use for the cars. Moments like that can create a bit of surprise and delight in the user experience."
The surprise and delight mentioned is something that Leyden adopted when redesigning RTÉ.ie earlier this year.
He described how the design transformed, to make content across all platforms more accessible for the users.
"What we've done with the design is to bring the organisation together for the user. The new design gives a fluid user experience be it for news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle, culture or if you're looking at video, listening to audio that it's really just a seamless experience," he said.
With the website being 25 years old, Leyden explains how communication with the users is central to the continuing improvement of the website.
He added, "We're listening to our users and getting their feedback and feeding that back into the design, iterating constantly."
At the panel discussion, Schmidt emulated the points made by Leyden on how users' understanding of information and technology allows companies to improve the user experience.
"I think overall we are generally speaking more fluent when it comes to understanding and working with data," said Schmidt
The main takes aways emphasised at the end of the session were:
- Prototyping - the importance of building prototypes, testing and validating your assumptions with your users. Prototyping should never end. Always be iterating and testing.
- Be Frictionless - make the user experience seamless. If you put barriers or confusion in the way of the end goal of the user, you will lose them.
- Be Delightful - the experience needs to be rewarding, the journey full of delight. Whether it's a game, an online publication or an e-commerce application - the requirement is the same.
Written by Liam Ashton
