UX Investing Equals Better Business
A positive user experience plays an important role in converting users into paying customers. We all can tell when a product just feels “natural” even if we don’t know exactly why. This is because the company that created it invested in designing the right user experience.
Ultimately good UX means better business.
We turn apps into products people love. Here is how we have done it.
Last year a client approached us to redesign their app. In their own words, “it feels dated.”
We spent the first half hour talking about their business. It was important for us to understand more about the company and their business model.
They had spent thousands of dollars in marketing campaigns to get people interested in their products. They had experimented with different channels and messages. They’ve done a lot of stuff promoting this app and their marketing efforts started to pay off as more and more users started to use the app.
But these users were not converting to paying customers.
Crappy Experience, Happy Experience
It was clear to us that the product’s user experience wasn’t right for the audience. They knew exactly where and when people left. The missing element was “Why.”
We focused on User Research. In our case, we always start with a deep dive into the company’s mission.
We started by understanding users motivations and expectations. We discovered that the feature that users valued the most was hidden and hard to get to. Also, the way the content was structured made it really difficult to explore the app. As a result users felt frustrated in the first few seconds and uninstalled the app.
Our research took two weeks. We started by defining the research scope and the questions we needed to answer. Since the app was already live, we wanted to see users interacting with it.
We had one-on-one session with seven users. In these sessions, we asked them to complete a task in the app without guidance from us. We wanted to see how easy or difficult it was for them to do it. We also asked them to “think out loud” as they used the app. Finally, we did a short interview with each of them. After these sessions, we were able to identify a very clear pattern of the obstacles that these users were running into.
Out next step was to translate our discoveries into insights. We used an affinity diagram method to do it.
The UI Solution
Next we turn them into UI solutions.
We worked closely with the development team to make sure our solutions were technically feasible. We provided them with high fidelity mockups, dynamics libraries, and assets for a smooth implementation.
We were able to improve the app’s UX dramatically with a few simple and quick changes based on the data that our lean research had generated. This made the app more intuitive to use and easy to explore.
The conversion rate exploded after the redesigned app was launched.
More Common that You’d Think
This is not an isolated case, conversion is a big challenge for many companies.
“According to Forrester Research, a well-designed UI can raise your website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%”
You only have a couple of seconds to make a good impression. A well designed user experience helps you take advantage of this precious time. The return on investment is obvious: more happy, paying customers.
Originally published at ux.nearsoft.com.
