UX as Your #1 Bootstrapping Hack
Well-established User Experience Design will allow you to save a lot of cash and time on your next successful product launch. Here is why and how.
In the previous article we’ve talked about The #1 Way to Save Money (and Time) on Your Startup App Development. We figured out that thinking first about your users, understanding their struggles, problems and wants at the very beginning is the key to saving money on application development. A properly set up User Experience Design process is a necessity.
The first, crucial step in this process is to really understand your business objectives, have a clear vision of what your business does and what value your application brings to the users. A lot of founders, unfortunately, tend to skip this stage, or do not put enough time in conducting a proper research in order to come up with a compelling value proposition.
Don’t Skip User and Business Research
A lot of startups first build the whole product, put 100s of features, then ask their potential users for feedback. That’s the moment they realize that 90% of their assumptions are a total waste that nobody will ever care to use. Then they get back to redesigning and working on the code again. They waste a lot of time and money. Don’t be like these guys.
The key is to constantly communicate with your users seeking feedback and implement changes to the prototype all the time. After that you can safely continue to the design and development stages.
Preparing is always better than fixing issues you’ve already developed and implemented. Moreover, even already successful businesses often fail at understanding users and their needs while using the app. As a result User Experience and User Interface are not suited to users’ needs, as intuitive and usable as they could be.
UX Makes the Difference
A simple example: for the first three years a SaaS company with an excellent product has had a form on their sign-up page with 9 fields to fill out before a user could start a free trial. Their competitors were outperforming them in terms of a user base count. The company figured out they could ask potential users to only leave their email in order to take the service for a free trial. In the result the bounce rate on this page has decreased by 28%! Just think about it: almost 30% of new business they could have been potentially gaining for the last three years.
Another example: a major e-commerce platform had problems with acquiring new customers. We figured that their web app was not allowing the site visitors to complete their first orders unless they register in the last step of the process. We suggested to get rid of the registration procedure as a whole for the first-time customers, and they saw a great increase in the completion rates of orders.
Did you just see your web/mobile app in these examples? These simple tricks allow for a dramatic increase in conversion rates, and cost almost $0 to implement. Moreover, you get more loyal customers that truly enjoy using your simple, but great service.
Build-Measure-Learn
Depending on your current state of things we may complement the Build — Measure — Learn cycle with some additional stages and steps:
- You don’t have a prototype/MVP yet:
Concept creation (research and analysis of your business opportunities and users’ needs) → Build (creation of great user experience prototypes, and only then design and coding.) → Measure (user testing) → Learn (from the users’ feedback).
2. You already have a prototype/MVP:
Learn from the users’ feedback → Build again (by implementing necessary changes to the User Experience logic, and only then design and code)→ Measure again → Learn again → Build some more.
So you either have a brilliant idea, but haven’t taken it much further than that or you already have an MVP and some positive feedback from potential users. What’s next?
Why Most Startups Fail? (Reason #2)
Read about the reason #1 in my previous article.
Poor execution. And therefore poor quality.
The most genius ideas will eventually be thrown out in a trash can if you don’t execute them properly, and in the startup world, you have to execute fast.
Invest in User Experience till it’s not too late.
There is a lot of work involved in the User Experience design process, and there are a lot of fancy words that are a part of this process like:
Card sorting, User stories, Ecosystem map, Task analysis, Heuristic analysis, Microinteractions. They help to create a great User Experience, and each deserves a separate article to be devoted to.
At this point, all you have to understand is that a well-established User Experience Design will allow you to:
- Clearly grasp your business objectives.
- Understand your users, their needs, expectations, assumptions and struggles.
- Confront your goals with your users’ goals.
- Optimize your value proposition.
- Create a User Experience that is clean and simple to navigate through.
- Eventually develop an app that is easy to understand and enjoyable to use.
- Gather a loyal base of users and clients that keep coming back to your app, because they love it.
And if you’re serious about building a great application that lots of people enjoys using, better have a professional or two by your back, and work with them together to figure your concept out. Thanks to that, you will most probably save a lot of cash and time on your next successful product launch.
Talk with UX specialists, talk with lots of them. Choose the ones that understand and care about your business and your objectives, and let them take care of your app and your users.
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About the Author
Daniil is responsible for Business development at EL Passion. You can find him on LinkedIn.
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