In the world of UX there are two main goals that must be aligned. Those are user, and business goals. Users using a product, and the business that owns that product need to have complimentary goals in order for both to be successful. That is the core of UX design.

Let’s break those goals down and see why they are important.

User Goals

A user is using an app or website for a reason, mainly beacause they need something from that product. Wether it be to connect to family/friends on Facebook, posting pictures of their food on Instagram, or reading the news with Flipboard.

Business Goals

There is a reason that every app or website has been made. Someone has realized that people love to read the news, so they brought news to everyones pocket with Flipboard, or realized that people want to “capture and share the worlds moments” as Instagram’s mission statement says. However, each app has it’s own business model, if you are a company like Facebook or Google and decide you want to make a lot of money selling ads, your business strategy is going to be a lot different than if you are a website like Etsy who charges its users 20 cents for every product that they upload to the site.

Complimentary Goals and Aligning

An example of great UX design is when you can align a business goal with a users goal so that both are successful, and both parties benefit from one another.

Google and YouTube are probably one of the greatest example of this. Amazon does an amazing job at this too, and we’ll look at them in a bit. An example of Youtube’s success would be that you visit YouTube for one main reason, to watch videos, thats the user’s goal. YouTube’s goal is to make money, while creating a service that allows people to watch videos. How does YouTube make money? With ads. So it’s fairly obvious you need to put the two together and put ads in the videos. However that is only completing the business goals, you then need to make things like the search intuitive so that users will watch more videos, resulting in more ads being watched and boom, everyone is happy.

If those goals aren’t aligned properly then what can happen is your business can have lots of users that are having a great time but the business is not benefiting from that, or there could be no users and again that creates no benefit for the business.

Let’s take a look at Amazon.

Amazon pioneered the one-click checkout. Why is this great UX design? Well, you go to Amazon for one main reason, to buy something. Amazon’s business goal is to make money from those transactions. The user is happy because they only need to click one button to checkout, making the act of buying things much easier. If it’s easier for people to buy things, more things will be bought. If more things get bought than Amazon makes money.

It’s clear to see that once you connect the dots and align the users goals with those of the business. The user can have an amazing experience and the business will benefit from that, in turn being able to improve their service resulting in improving the user’s experience as well. It’s a win-win for everyone.

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