Over the years of my experience as a UX practitioner, I have heard many questions raised about “why do we need UX design?”, “How does UX contributes to our business?” and “How do you measure UX?”.
UX design has been conventionally thought of as something which creates a holistic experience for your customers, one that provides intuitive layouts, usable functionalities and sensible user journeys. However, many have missed out that with all these intuitiveness, it then leads to the next step which is making the business more profitable through customer satisfaction.
Here, I will cover three key points on how UX design can effectively help in business growth and profitability:
#1 Good user experience = customer satisfaction = return customers
In order to bring about good user experience, it is both looking at usability and aesthetic aspects. For example,
- Clear call-to-actions that stands out with a concise directives and meaning
- Getting user to transact in just a few or even one click away
- Choosing the right font type and size for readability
- Choosing the right icon that conveys the right intention
- Coherent color schemes for all clickable elements
All of these experiences then drives the customer’s emotions.
With good user experience, the chances of customers staying on the same page and complete their task is higher, which then helps the business gets more conversion if the task leads to a transaction or even higher retention rate.
#2 Moving in the right product direction with user-centric design
Many companies aim to launch their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as quickly as possible to get buy-in from their clients. Many have overlooked that clients are ‘human’ who also looks into the intuitiveness of the product and whether it matches the real use-cases of their customers before releasing the product.
Taking a step back to conduct user or stakeholder interviews to nail down the product requirements at an early stage as compared to finding requirements mismatch.
This serves as a guide to identify the types of UX research you could use at different stages of the product life cycle:
#3 Save time, resources and money
Many have thought that by including UX into the product development lifecycle process, it will slow down the development and product release.
Considering UX and involving careful thoughts on user’s intention earlier will avoid spending more time on iterating the product or starting the product all over again because of wrong product direction. With UX consideration, it will help to reduce the commitment on time, money and resources to build a product.
A tip to get an alignment on product direction is to work on low fidelity UX prototyping to quickly get the ideas across to key stakeholders.
Once an idea gets through, development then starts on backend and framework structuring while designers work towards the main design deliverables before frontend kick starts. There is no time wasted waiting for designers to complete design before development.
Overall benefits of UX for business
- Increase conversion rate
- Save development time
- Decrease in drop-offs
- Reduce the amount of trainings
- Reduce user errors
- Decrease number of calls for help desk support
- More usage of software applications
… and the list goes on
Credits to Yip LyeHoe for the above illustrations
