The Impact of UX Design in Business

What is User Experience?

User Experience (UX) is the overall feeling or experience that a person gets when using a product such as a website, mobile device or soft ware application.

UX explains how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, case of use and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to companies when creating and refining products.

How Does User Experience Impact Business?

Research by McKinsey proves that great UX design provides impeccable user experience, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, business growth. In business growth and revenue development, UX plays a significant role.

For every business, the customers are of utmost importance. Products should be easy to use, functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Stand out from the crowd on the basis of user experience.

User experience is a deciding factor when it comes to differentiating from your competitors within the same niche or industry. Enterprises, SMEs and Startups around the world are embracing good UX design and banking over the benefits that come along with it.

Invision Design’s research shows that 94% of the first impressions of a website or app interface are related to design. This is why industry leaders like Google, Amazon, Airbnb and others have shifted their focus towards delivering a user experience.

In 2020, customer experience has become the front and center of software applications, whereas pricing and the product have taken a backseat. Let’s list down some ways in which a good UX can help your brand stand out:

Good UX means customers will be less likely to switch brands.

A great initial impression means visitors are more likely to return to your website.

Higher brand credibility stems from good design.

Average time spent on pages would go up.

Personalized content & experience would help boost conversions.

Improve customer retention with enhanced UX

In a study by MITX in 2009, it is estimated that user experience design contributes to saving 50% of wasted development time. The right time to invest is before you begin developing your product. Doing so would make your development efforts more efficient, targeted, and structured.

If you ignore the UX in the initial stages while you perfect the product core, it would cost you time and money in the long run. You will have to keep revisiting the design to accommodate the users’ needs, preferences, and perfect the user flows and navigation. This would consume a lot of development time and finances, which is easily avoidable if enough time is spent on finalizing the UX design in the pre-development phase.

According to WebFx, investing $1 in your site’s UX will give you an ROI of $100 in the long run. This means, today, we can’t prioritize aesthetics over functionality or vice versa, so your product needs to be beautiful and functional simultaneously.

Boost sales & revenue with effective UX design

Focusing more on UX will help increase user engagement, and hence, boost conversion rate as well. This means, more and more users would turn into customers, resulting in rising sales as well as revenue.

Research conducted by Toptal shows that 90% of the users will continue shopping because of great UX. It’s highly likely that your users will opt for your competition if they have a bad experience with your product or service. This could be anything from complex navigation, difficulty in conducting a search, not knowing where you are at a moment, to generic (not customized) content, repetitive pop-ups/interruptions or distractions, and so much more.

Therefore, it’s always a good idea to optimize your product or app for mobile and web by prioritizing UX design.

UX design is all about the users. So it’s essential that the designers think like users and incorporate features that can help make the user flows more intuitive. It’s always a brilliant idea to map out the customer journey before beginning the UX design and product development.

Users should always have a way to orient themselves during navigation of the website or product. This adds to a good user experience. If these things are taken into consideration, customer retention is more likely to increase. Some factors that boost consumer loyalty and help a brand retain them are:

Personalized experience on a brand’s website or product.

Web pages and images that load in the shortest possible time.

Detailed contact information is available to the users.

Availability of informative content and resources relevant to your product and services.

Great customer service, timely responses, and a quick and simple way to connect.

Decreased need for training and documentation

The easier a system is to use, the less training and documentation is needed. Very few people want to

attend training or read documentation in order to start using an application, a website, or a product. Most would rather just get started using it and figure it out on their own. Initial ease of use is crucial for websites and consumer products, because they need to be immediately easy to use. Training and documentation is not an option for websites, and very few people will buy products that require attending training or reading documentation.

Stay relevant with continuous UX iterations

The Tech industry is evolving rapidly. Brands need to constantly update their outlook as well as product offerings in order to stay relevant to what’s next. This means continuous iterations are essential in order to future-proof your product’s design and core functionalities. No design is ever perfectly complete – if it stays stagnant for too long, it grows out of date, which results in a big drop in customer engagement, and hence, your revenue and profit. WebFx says that 75% of your product’s credibility comes from design. This means, if your design is not up to date and in line with the user experience trends, it can affect your product’s authenticity and customers are less likely to buy from you.

Benefits for the whole company
Employing a user-centric UX process can benefit all departments in a company, including the marketing and development teams. Researching and defining users can create a better understanding of who they are and what they want to achieve.

These understanding and research mechanisms can be made available to all areas to place the user at the center of a more informed and precise business activity in decision-making. For example, user and artifact research can enable business intelligence to make better decisions based on research from actual users and customer needs. User data can help the marketing department target users and produce more effective and engaging content.

Conclusion

Good UX design impacts businesses greatly, especially when customers are at the crux of product experiences.

If one interaction defines the purchasing decision of customers. It’s easy to imagine the magnanimity of the importance UX design holds in software development.

Delivering some of the most actionable insights that are of great importance to make informed business decisions, UX has the capability to create new business models that go on to become a necessary part of our evolving digital economy and everyday existence.