7 Compelling Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Care about User Experience
A byproduct of working with tech startups is buzzwords. Ambiguous activities are described as being Lean, Agile, Minimum Viable Products, Pivots, Disruptive, Growth Hacking, Curation, Leverage, Traction, and Scaleable. It can be hard to keep track of them all, let alone establish universal translations.
Another one that has become fairly mainstream recently is User Experience, aka UX. If you aren’t familiar…
User Experience is defined as the activity that encompasses all of the user’s interactions with a company and its products or services.
To put this definition in context think about this; if you are serving customers, you are already providing them an interaction with your company. While this obviously applies to how a customer purchases one of your products online, it includes live human interactions; like the communication a customer has with a waiter. A user experience, whether you have properly defined it or not, is happening!
Now if you talk to any restaurant owner, you will quickly find out how much emphasis and investment they put into ensuring their staff provides customers (users) an incredible dining experience. This experience ranges from the ambiance of the interior, to the host who greets, to the server who facilitates the meal, and even down to the free mints and post-meal wet naps. It is this experience that surrounds the core product (the meal), that makes or breaks the customer’s perception of the business and their propensity to return/recommend friends. In fact, according to a recent Boston dining survey that fielded responses from over 7,500 customers who dined at 1,400 restaurants, 65% of customers named service (user experience) as the number one complaint, not the food (core product).
So if user experiences matter so much in real-world interactions, wouldn’t that principle apply to digital experiences??
If you’re not convinced, here are 7 reasons why UX is worth a deeper look; especially if you do a lot of business or lead generation online.
1. Digital Interfaces
Remember the server I was talking about earlier, the one who facilitated your meal at the restaurant, ensured you were informed about your purchase options, delivered the product, processed your payment, and sent you off with courteous thank you. Well for your online presence and e-commerce, that waiter is your website. While this may sound scary, the great thing about a website is that it works 24 hours a day and doesn’t even take bathroom breaks! Understanding this hopefully can help newbies to digital UX understand the importance of investing resources and research into how users interact with this critical digital channel.
2. First Impressions Matter
Would you show up to meet a potential customer dressed in sweatpants and a tank top? Would you stay up the entire night before, leading you to be exhausted and irritable during the meeting? Probably not; so remember that people visiting your website for the first time judge your product and company on the same merits. 94% of first impressions are design related, and if your site is clunky or hard to navigate that will negatively impact the visitor’s perception of the quality of your product.
3. Poor Experiences Stand Out
Unfortunately, people tend to focus on the negative aspects of a situation, even if the majority of it was positive. People love to complain and banter about “horrible” experiences they have had with companies, just check out Yelp! Unfortunately, these bad experiences carry a heavy amount of weight, especially when you are trying to create brand ambassadors and build word-of-mouth advertising.
4. You Care About Your Customers… Right?
Building off of point 3, one positive thing to note is that when a company goes above and beyond to provide incredible service you take notice. However, the same goes for when you’re calling your bank to report an unknown charge and they put you on hold for 45 minutes. We all have had that feeling… even though the bank says in it’s voicemail recording that it cares, it’s actions shows that it doesn’t.
The same feeling applies to customers visiting a poorly designed website or trying to navigate a convoluted software program. Personally, I remember a time when I was buying a bike tour from a company in Montreal. I tried to buy the tour through the company’s website, but the payment gateway redirected me to an offsite PayPal page. Due to the confusion I had with this process I cancelled my payment from their site, had to call them to ensure I hadn’t paid, and due to all of the frustration I had endured I purchased a bike tour from one of their competitors. Empathy for your customers is the real name of the UX game, and as you’ll see showing some can provide major dividends.
5. Investing in UX = ROI
Beyond the aesthetic and practical reasons for improving usability, there are measured financial benefits to creating incredible user experiences. To put it bluntly, every dollar invested in UX yields a return between $2 and $100. If that doesn’t get you to stop and think for a moment I don’t know what will! Did you know that a recent study conducted by the Aberdeen Group showed that companies that optimized their site for mobile saw a 10.9% increase in visitor-to-buyer conversions?
6. The Top Performers Care
Another interesting macroeconomic observation (and possible investing strategy) involving the value of UX can be seen by looking at the top publicly traded companies. Customer experience leaders historically and substantially outperform companies that ignore it.
7. The User Experience IS the Product
Let’s revisit the definition of UX one more time. It is the activity that encompasses all of the user’s interactions with a company and its products/services. You heard that right, every single interaction. Combine that with the understanding that in order for a company to provide value, some form of interaction with the customer has to take place to distribute the product/service. This means that User Experiences are fundamental components of every transfer of value.
Dramatics aside, what you need to understand is that great UX is not a frivolous, artistic luxury. It is an absolutely essential part of the core product that literally plays a part in every point of contact between your customers and your company. Poor UX significantly diminishes the value of your product or service; just ask a restaurant owner who has had to fire bad servers.
UX and your products or services are not mutually exclusive entities, they are massively interdependent. So as you are thinking about ways to improve and grow your business in a digital world, don’t forget about how your customers interact with you at your digital touch-points!
Helm Experience & Design is a digital product and UX focused studio proudly located in Buffalo, NY.
You can check out our work here and if you’d like to talk more about design, technology, or business just send us an email at team@helmux.com.
