UX Shouldn’t Need a GPS - Finding a Better User Experience

I recently had the incredible opportunity to travel to Dubai. It’s a city of extremes: intense 120° F heat, malls with skiing and diving—with tiger sharks—and architectural feats beyond my wildest imagination. Out of all these wonders, what impressed me the most was the ever-evolving infrastructure of this bustling, technologically advanced city.

In Dubai, the roads change constantly to account for all of the new construction. In fact, they change so frequently that residents and taxi drivers say they often run into a dead end or end up trapped on a road that has changed overnight. GPS isn’t just used for convenience in Dubai, it’s used for survival.

A website’s information architecture is a lot like a city’s infrastructure: as you add new information, you need to create new navigation. If you’re constantly changing where you place information and how customers navigate your website, your users will be just as lost as drivers in Dubai.

A common method to improve the user experience (or UX) of a digital space is to mimic a real world pattern. For example, e-commerce mimics a grocery store: you typically have a shopping cart, you add to the shopping cart, and then you go through the checkout process.

The challenge comes when you start building and adding on to the original experience. While Dubai’s original city center is pretty easy to navigate, as the city grew at a rapid pace the new roads ignored the original conventions. Often—to accommodate new construction—roads had to be shifted and changed, causing friction and confusion among drivers. When designing your website, it’s imperative that you account for how it may evolve in the future and avoid foreseeable challenges as your company grows.

Sandstorm has a dedicated team of UX design specialists—including designers, architects and researchers—who help clients build websites that utilize information architecture best practices and provide cutting-edge user experiences.