Welcome back, our series on enhancing UX with credible content continues today but if you’ve missed any of the rest of the series – you can find it under the UX Daily tab on our website.

One of the simplest ways to enhance the user experience is to communicate clearly and meaningfully with your users. Let’s take a look at how that can work in practice:

Clear Communication

Deliver Real Product Information

Yes, it’s important to tell your customers how great your products are but it would be nice if you highlighted their limitations too. Almost every product, when you’re comparison shopping, has something that makes it awesome and something that means you might be better off buying something slightly different.

Author/Copyright holder: Cascadian Farm. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC 2.0

Ask your users what they want to know if you’re not certain but don’t neglect providing enough detail for them to make a choice. Your competitors will.

Help People Make Comparisons

If you sell 10 different Canon cameras; make it easy for users to tell at a glance what’s different between them all. As a camera owner this is one of the most important things you can do for me (and most other camera owners); there’s an overwhelming amount of choice in this space and we need to be able to weigh up the differences to know whether we’re buying something that will do what we want it to. This is true in dozens of other fields too.

Don’t Hide Recalls

If a product is subject to a recall; then tell you users about it. Shout it out. Don’t bury it in a tiny line at the end of several hundred pages of other product information. Draw attention to it on the home page and then provide a place where you can provide all the information a user needs to know about that product. Product recalls happen. Even the best QC processes go astray – how you handle that recall is what’s important.

Your company’s reputation hinges on dealing with your customers in the way that you would expect to be treated. Imagine, you’d been sold an exploding car (a not unheard of event in this world) – what would you want to know? How would you want to be told? Do that for your customers and you won’t go far wrong.

Plain English Versions of Terms and Conditions

Yes, the legalese may be necessary for your company lawyers to stop fretting but your customers aren’t going to plough through it all and it’s almost dishonest to pretend that they will. Draw their attention to the important bits and turn it into plain English and they will feel better informed and much more likely to trust you.

The same goes for complex delivery options (like international shipping); make it easy to understand where you will and won’t ship to and what it costs. I can’t tell you how many businesses have lost sales because they won’t ship to me here in Cambodia… and I can’t tell you how angry it makes me when I learn about that at the last click of an hour’s considered shopping.

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