5 reasons UX design is business critical
As we conduct more and more of our daily activities online, it’s never been more critical to offer users a seamless and smooth digital experience that aligns with their needs. It is now a basic requirement of implementation strategies across all platforms and devices and the positive impact on businesses is undeniable.
1 – Builds Trust and Brand Value
First impressions count a lot towards whether a customer can trust your product. When customers first arrive at your site or app they will very quickly make a judgment on whether this feels like a professional company who cares about their customers. This will be based on layout, design, functionality and information architecture. If this doesn’t speak to them as a target customer then they will leave. Expectations of digital experiences have increased massively in the last ten years. Digital businesses invest so much more time and money in UX today that the bar has been forever raised. Also, customers have become increasingly sophisticated, empowered and promiscuous online with much shorter attention spans spent across multiple devices and platforms. Therefore if a digital experience is clunky and complicated, the irritation factor is magnified, your brand value is degraded and the customer disappears.
2 – Makes you competitive
Companies who fail to provide an optimal experience for their users will find themselves at a significant disadvantage to competitors who currently provide a better experience. If your navigation isn’t optimised and users can’t see the right signpost immediately they will bounce and move to a competitor site. If your flows are non-intuitive and take a lot of mental effort from the user they will rate your entire service much lower than the competition. And if the site content doesn’t immediately resonate with them as individuals then they will find a site that does.
3 – Increases User Conversion and Retention
An excellent user experience means that your product is easy and enjoyable to use. If you provide this kind of experience then your customers will continue to use it, use it more often and recommend it to others. A recent study from Forrester Research found that a well-designed user interface could raise your conversion rate by up to 400%.
Provides the foundation for cheaper and quicker web development
Well thought out, tested and iterated UX design ensures that problems are fixed before the development team get started so that rework of expensive code is greatly reduced. You’ll save time and money, increase productivity and build better products. The development team can still get going in parallel to the UX activity because they can work on backend services while the UX is being bottomed out.
4- Helps you define your MVP
The very nature of assessing product features through the eyes of the end user (the heart of UX design) means that priorities for your product will become much clearer, starting with the MVP and what really needs to go in it, and continuing through into prioritising the backlog for future releases. The insights and assets that are generated during UX design galvanise the team into a shared product vision and also make stakeholder management so much easier and evidence-based.
5 – Saves you money
Investment in UX design is not simply an option when developing products – it plays a critical role in the success of your business.
“For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.”
Robert Pressman, Software Engineering – A Practitioner’s Approach
If you understand the problems you’re solving and who you’re solving them for, you can deliver a product that customers want to experience again and again. To do that, you need to bake a good UX design into your project, upfront.