6 Crucial Reasons Why You Should Invest in UX (User Experience)

“52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.”

This, among the other 29 stats compiled by Experience Dynamics – a usability consulting firm – present an astounding image of the importance of User Experience (UX). A poor UX design may affect your potential reach. The importance of UX has soared as the need for a worthwhile experience has increased.

The popularity of UX design has led to a rise in the misconceptions that surround the practice. The most common is that a UX merely reflects the way the interface is designed, and nothing more. On the contrary, UX is much more than just appearance. It is a holistic approach – including accessibility, functionality and overall satisfaction from usage.

Let’s take a look at ways UX adds value to your business.

What Value Does UX Design Bring?

Achieving customer satisfaction is tough. A well-balanced UX design can help you convert more customers. A solid UX design can offer a user-centric experience while making sure you don’t get bankrupt in the process.

Improve Conversion Rate:

UX design can help you if you want users to do more than just click on a few links and actively interact with your platform.

With statistical techniques like Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) at your fingertips, tracing a user’s actions (or lack thereof) becomes easier. CJM tries to follow users actions on a website from beginning to end, and analyses the way they behave, including links that they click, pages that they view, and so forth. Through this, UX designers can push users to take actions that they desire, which significantly improves conversion rates for websites.

UX designs with clear call to actions (CTAs) on high-traffic web pages usually help increase engagements. An example of a call to action is a big “Subscribe Now!” button at the end of an article which redirects the user to another page.

A powerful UX will also lead to a higher number of users, which in turn will increase the basket size– Average basket size refers to the number of items getting sold in a single purchase. So, more users mean that the likelihood of a user performing a desired task increases. This explains why the return on investment (ROI) for every dollar invested in UX ranges from $10 to $100.

So, customers seem happier on your website – but, do they feel inclined to engage?

Increase Customer Retention

Having a flashy website might get you a lot of customers who look at the platform like a shiny object, but once it loses its sheen, they’re not likely to visit again.

A good UX can do the same job as a smart salesman: making sure that customers keep coming back. Powerful UX designs can reduce bounce rates significantly, since the elements of the webpage can be restructured to make users want to stay on your website a little longer.

Statistics in consumer insight can be your best friend in this endeavor. Do you have too much text on a page? Are your CTA buttons not clear enough? Is your content not relevant? Through methods like A/B testing, you can tweak around with different permutations of design elements on your page, and use tools like Google Analytics to identify bounce rate improvements.

People are visual creatures, which entails that nearly all of your customer retention strategies will be dependent on your UX design.

Acquire Greater Business Intelligence

Information can be your greatest asset.

Making informed business decisions can be tricky, which is why business intelligence can be imperative. A good UX will give you the leeway to acquire as much of this information as possible to make sure that your users are getting their money’s worth.

There are a number of useful business intelligence tools that can optimise a UX’s performance. As mentioned before, Google Analytics offers a number of features that are integral to making a good UX, such as data analytics, visualisation, and all-purpose dashboards. These can be supplemented by features like customer reviews and customer satisfaction surveys, which ask users what they think the problem is, and how they believe a particular offering stands in comparison to others. Research shows that customers trust online reviews more than ever before, which makes this an effective tool to gather data.

Reduce Developmental Costs

How can investing in UX reduce your business costs? To answer this, let’s look at the two primary stages involved in implementing UX: prototyping and usability testing.

A prototype is a model of the end-product, built to test functionality and make final changes. If done properly, prototyping can potentially minimise errors in the final product and save on development costs. Since it scales back redundant features, it reduces development time and costs. This makes prototyping the optimal tool for interface design.

Usability testing, on the other hand, allows potential users to test the product and provide valuable feedback which can be incorporated into the final stage of development. Users can make content and aesthetic recommendations, based on which a good UX design can be created.

Website wireframes can be a designer’s biggest ally to ensure smooth operations. A website wireframe refers to the blueprint of the platform: what it will potentially look like, how it will function, and how users will interact with it.

A couple of the most popular wireframe tools online are inVision and Lucidchart, capable of designing workflows from beginning to end.

You can save on customer support costs through a user-friendly UX design. A bad UX can be harmful for platforms that aren’t very user-friendly.

Increase in Social Media Sharing

The best websites are those that not only give users a memorable experience, but they make users want to share that experience with others.

To achieve this, it is important to have UX designs that listen to users. It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that you incorporate every suggestion that your users give, but rather, that you keep an eye on the user’s progress – which is an important tenet of user research.

Sharable websites also have another characteristic in common: they are appealing to the eye. After all, you want to talk about websites that you think are nice to look at, and not the ones that feel like they were put together at last minute.

This involves the reduction of practices like feature creep, which is characterised by the addition of too many unnecessary features on a website, contributing to clutter. It is important that content on a UX design is manageable for the designers and captivating for users.

Shareable buttons

UX designs should also give users clear options to access social media consistently in website interactions. This involves the use of large, visible buttons that connect directly with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.

The number of benefits of investing in UX design mentioned in this short blog are far from exhaustive. UX has now become the primary focus of some of the best organisations around the world. The number of internet users have increased by billions in the past two decades. You will most certainly benefit from a great UX, no matter the type of organisation you may be.

Give Your Business A Competitive Edge with UX

The importance of facts and figures cannot be emphasised enough. However, it is important to account for that which data does not: human emotion and intuition. With a powerful UX design, it is possible to do both.

Whether you’re a growing organisation or a person with the passion to create, the benefits of investing in UX are numerous. UX designing allows for your interactions with your users to improve manifold, both in terms of overall satisfaction, and in terms of retention. It allows for better data collection and implementation of ideas, while simultaneously making sure that users perform desirable actions on your website. It also reduces costs and increases reach in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

UX development will soon make virtual experiences just as meaningful as real ones, so if you want your business to stay ahead of the curve, investing in UX design should be your next big goal.

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