Ask Clover: How can UX design influence my company's success?
As we increasingly conduct our lives online, it's never been more critical to give users a seamless, frictionless digital experience. And as such, the fields of user interface and user experience design—both critical pieces of a digital user’s online journey—have seen a sharp rise in popularity and demand.
In fact, a Consumer Reports study found that users judge a website’s credibility based 75% on its overall aesthetics. Therefore, given that people now view an optimized user experience as a basic requirement, it’s become essential for companies to implement such experiences across all platforms and devices to better meet the needs and desires of their users.
But how will this affect your company’s overall success? Simply put, design and user experience can affect customer acquisition, customer engagement, and churn rate.
In October 2003, Nokia released the N-Gage device which was a combination of phone and game console. Cool right? Nope. It was a big failure for Nokia. The product was based on perceived user needs formed from assumptions rather than actual data.
User experience designers, however, are trained to bridge the gap between these assumptions and actual facts using research techniques such as: user interviews, focus groups, and field studies. They then help your team better understand your customers, and thus, which new features to implement and how to do so. Hiring a UX designer may increase your expenses and the research, understanding, and discovery may take longer, but they will save you so much time and money in the future.
“Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.” ― Eric Ries
So the question then becomes, how do you justify the expense and measure its effect on your company’s success?
When customers come to your site, you have only seconds to influence them. By investing in UX optimization, you quickly gain trust, brand recognition, and ensure user retention. As a strategic design and brand content team, we know this to be true. Therefore, we recommend our clients conduct a cost-benefit analysis incorporating statistics on UX ROI can prove beneficial in comparing before-and-after results against key performance indicators.
In Robert Pressman’s book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, an early business justification for UX is made that’s hard to argue: “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.” This is to say that every dollar invested in UX returns $10 to $100, and correcting the problem from the start is most cost-effective.
The bottom line—by implementing UX strategies, you can effectively improve how your company engages and interacts with its customers via any device or application. And with just over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile, your company must create a seamless experience from desktop to mobile, and vice versa.
This applies both to internal and external operations with companies seeing increased sales, lower cost of customer acquisition, increased customer retention, more market share, and less training costs. Alternately, a user experience that is not optimized can drastically decrease conversions.
Whether a website, app, or B2B tool, nearly every business with a digital presence across industries can benefit from refining its user experience. Delivering some of the most actionable insights critical to making informed business decisions, UX has the capacity to create new business models that go on to become a necessary part of our evolving digital landscape and everyday existence.
Oftentimes, bringing in an outside perspective is necessary to break past a company's long-held assumptions, while providing unbiased, expert opinions. Furthermore, investing in a UX partner equips your organization with the expertise necessary to provide consistently positive experiences that keep a user loyal to your brand, in addition to helping your company keep pace with digital trends and the needs of your audience.
Our agency is frequently brought in to help companies with UX strategy and design, user research, and even the creation of a digital innovation strategy. If any of these scenarios describe your situation, set up a free consultation today, and let's explore whether an outsourced UX partner is right for you.
Or if you simply have a few burning UX questions, we’d love to hear from you!
