Bad design decisions make you lose revenue
Surely, you or your boss have already thought about how to increase company revenues. Access to huge repositories of user data as well as the utilization of artificial intelligence to analyze them reveals powerful business opportunities. Thanks to direct communication between business and customers through social networks, instant messengers and chatbots customer service has also reached a new level.
All these new techniques redefine our business decisions on development new products. The user-centric design approach allows business to solve user tasks more efficiently. But what makes some companies more successful than others?
What design actions can leaders take to unlock business value?
To answer this questions, we have conducted extensive research. So let’s start our journey!
What’s inside:
- Design development process and designer’s role.
- Common mistakes in product design.
- How to increase company revenues through design process.
Design development process and designer’s role
Do you think design is just nice looking pictures? Then read on.
What designers actually do?
Design begins with research.
A discovery is a preliminary phase in the UX-design process that involves researching the problem space, framing the problem(s) to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next. Discoveries do not involve testing hypotheses or solutions.
In ISS Art we consider consider research is the first thing to do. In each project in which we participate, we put the user needs and user experience as the driving force of all the decisions on the project.
- UI/UX designer collects data about the audience, and also understands which companies are direct competitors and which are indirect. (To give examples: McDonald’s and BurgerKing are direct competitors, skype and business flights are indirect, etc.).
- Along with it UI/UX expert also develops ways of user interaction with the product, designs a transition map on the website or application screens, etc.
- Then UI/UX designer forms requirements for developers. Generally speaking, designer builds communication between the product and customers.
It depends directly on designer whether your product will be remembered, whether it will be preferred to competitors, whether it will solve user tasks successfully and, ultimately, whether customers will buy a subscription, service, product, etc.
Common mistakes in product design
Here is a list of common mistakes:
- We will postpone the creation of the design;
- We will use ready-made solutions: templates;
- The main thing is to make functionality, design is secondary;
- Developers can make the product themselves;
- Our users do not care about design.
Sounds familiar? Then let’s see what the bad design of your product will cost you.
ROI For UX/UI Design
To get started, let’s look at the methods of evaluating a design. Yes, there is an ROI for design.
UX benchmarking refers to evaluating a product or service’s user experience by using metrics to measure its relative performance against a meaningful standard.
Essentially, benchmarking involves collecting quantitative data that describes the experience. Nielsen Norman Group gives examples of the following UX metrics, we might collect:
- Average time to make a purchase.
- Numbers of clicks on a Submit button.
- Success rate for an application completion.
- Average ease-of-use rating for creating an account.
- Eight-week retention rate for an app (percentage of users continuing to use the app after eight weeks).
Companies that aren’t focused on creating great user experiences are usually happen to deal with poor user experiences.
We can measure the experience that comes from a product or service design on a scale that ranges from extreme frustration to extreme delight.
American usability expert Jared Spool, in his article, talks about frustration when using poor design. Almost always, when there is extreme frustration coming from a product or service design, that frustration turns into company’s lost of money because of:
- Lost of sales revenue. Sales are going to competitors, the salesforce is discounting to compensate, or customers are spending too much time to sign up.
- Lost of productivity costs. Backlogs require more working hours preventing the organization from being efficient.
- Wasted development rewrites. Development costs are higher because the team rewrites the same code multiple times.
- Unused feature development. Development costs for never-used features is a resource that could’ve been used to build something else.
- Increased support costs. Call-center representatives spend time answering calls that come from the user’s poor experience.
How to increase company revenues through the design process
So, poor design costs lost revenue for the company. What happens if you invest enough of the company’s resources to design?
The business value of design
We all know examples of bad product and service design.
Pedestrian countdowns for example are supposed to reduce accidents. But studies have suggested that they in fact increase accidents. The study says the increase could be from drivers who speed up when they see they have little time left to cross an intersection.
Instead, often good design appears invisible — it doesn’t get in the way of the user.
For example, voice search. It’s very inconvenient and extremely dangerous to type in text on the search field while driving. A voice recognition tool that instantly helps to provide the route for the desired location simply solves that problem.
Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.
— Don Norman
Good design is one that fills the gap between business goals and user needs.
So, how does the design affects your business?
The McKinsey & Company international consulting firm conducted one of the largest worldwide studies ever to measure revenues and shareholder returns related to good design culture in companies. They found that best design performers increased their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts.
Top-quartile MDI scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period — 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.
The results held true in all three of the industries they looked at: medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking. This fact suggests that good design matters whether your company focuses on physical goods, digital products, services, or some combination of them.
Invision provides us with another survey they made. Many industries from banking, media, retail, professional services reported on the impact of design to their organizations. The report says that just 5% of those surveyed are reaping the greatest benefits from their design, and 41% of organizations have significant room to grow.
So, how to level up your company through the design process?
The participation of business leaders in the development process proves a good practice to start growing seeds of design culture in an organization. When we start working with a client in ISS Art, we always try to get access to the highest level decision-maker in the project. We involve them in the design process as much as possible. We consider this as the key for the success of any project. For CEOs, spending time with the customers and getting familiar with their needs first hand provides not just valuable experience and knowledge for them, it also sets an example throughout the company by placing the users first. In the rapidly changing technology market, design is the only way to stand out and earn the love of users.
Conclusion
To bring value to your project or your customer’s products via design we suggest using following.
Utilize user-centric design approach
Use the available repositories of data and modern technologies such as AI to solve user tasks better than competitors and then users will pay you back with their love. And money.
Get involved
Get familiar with the real needs of your customers and participate in the design process as much as possible.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Design alone will not solve your problems if there are any issues with the business infrastructure or quality of the product development. Place an order for development services only with competent specialists. Remember that the product or service that you are developing, for example, a mobile application, is just a tool for your business. All other parts of the system should work just as well.
