Why UX is worth investing?

When you hear the word “design”, you think about beautiful illustrations, paintings or fashion. However, design definition has an even broader perspective: it is the process of creating service, product or a system.

User experience (UX) is a part of the design definition, which focuses on making complex applications and platforms to be easily used. The optimized solutions, that UX designers find, can have a significant influence on your company success. Unfortunately, many business owners still underestimate the benefits that they can receive by implementing UX design tactics in their daily work.

Solving the wrong problem?

Most of the times, new startups are so excited about their future product or service, that they skip one significantly important step - user research. The whole team can be working on a solution, thinking that they “know the users”, when in the majority of cases, that knowledge is based only on personal assumptions and opinions. As a result, many startups tend to fail during the launch of their product, because the understanding of their user's needs was simply wrong.

Identifying issues in the early stage

Making high fidelity wireframes and testing them, before development or even interface design phase, helps to find issues in the early stage of the product creation process. As it was once said “A good rule of thumb: test early (with real users) and test often. Businesses simply fail without happy customers. Make yours happy with good UX.” (source).

Shorter Development cycles

A well-managed design process can reduce development time. While UX designers are busy planning and testing their wireframes or analyzing potential users, the development team can start working on basis of the product or prepare the back-end that is already set to be developed. Once the design is done, developers can start integrating front-end tasks, without needing to solve design issues, that are not even their strongest skill. Changes in the prototyping stage require significantly fewer resources, rather than fixing a problem in the development stage. As a result, decisions can be made quicker and with lower cost.

“According to IBM, code defects are 30 times more expensive to correct than using the right information in the first place. It is extremely unlikely that these coding defects will occur if you choose the UX design.” Steve Olenski, Forbes

Customer retention

Established businesses need UX designers to constantly improve their product by focusing on the users. According to the research, which interviewed around 1500 consumers: “88% of online consumers are less likely to return to the website after a bad experience” (source). In short, good UX makes customers feel more satisfied and increases the chance of using the application again.

Better reviews

It takes only one negative review and thousands of people might not download your application or choose not to buy the product. Baymard Institute in their study found, that 95% of users relied on reviews before getting to know more about the company’s products. By understanding our user, we can create a better user experience, which would lead to positive reviews.

It can increase your sales!

There was a study made in 2016 by NEA (source) which analyzed more than 400 companies. Results have found, that businesses which invested a lot of resources in user experience, had a 75% increase in sales. Other “design-mature” companies, which invested a slightly smaller amount in UX, recognized a 61% rise in sales. In addition, almost all companies which said design is “important” or “very important” planned to double spending in the upcoming year.

UX as a priority objective?

According to Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2018 Digital Trends (source), half of the companies surveyed place experience management as one of their top 3 strategic priority objectives for 2018. Also, during 2017, almost 70% of the companies that called themselves “design-driven” - exceeded their business goals. Important to note that well-designed user journeys with clear communication, had a high importance in top performing companies based on statistics in the report. These findings show, that UX designers play a significantly important role in today's businesses.

All in all

User experience helps companies to understand their user needs, shorten development cycles and increase sales by making well thought, research-based solutions. Designing experiences have a high importance in today's businesses and like 95% of the users agree: “Good user-experience just makes sense”.