What users want: Functional user experience

Increasingly, consumers of all product types and services demand and expect ease of use and functionality in day to day experiences and undertakings. If users can´t find a product or use a service to achieve their goal, they become frustrated and go searching elsewhere. So we need to look at how best to design engaging and common sense functionality and experiences to retain users. The purpose of this paper is to best understand who end-users of web sites, applications, products and services are, and what they want to achieve when using these web sites, applications, products; and what their expectations of services might be. After this process of discovering what the users really want and need, the challenge is to then design web sites, applications, products and services to meet those needs. This paper will investigate and discuss the most effective methods to apply to gain valuable insights into user and customer needs and their contexts.