5 Reasons why UX design is important for your business
Benoit De MotHead Of UX
Chances are, most professionals will be familiar with the term UX, or user experience. The concept is widespread and with good reason — every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return. Now those are results that most businesses should be looking to enjoy.
UX has been around since Apple coined the term in the ’80s. While the “what actually is it” has had some variations over the years, UX in its most common form touches on everything that touches upon the user’s experience with the product; from the way they can or cannot easily describe it to their friends, to the purchase process, customer service experience and the unboxing or sign-up experience.
UX design involves engineering, marketing, graphics and industrial design, as well as interface design departments to bring together these experiences.
So, what makes UX so valuable to businesses?
5 Reasons why UX is important
The business value of UX is significant. Forrester Research suggests that a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400 per cent. That’s right. UX design is more than building strong brand credibility and user satisfaction, UX boosts sales and helps organisations to catapult their business forward.
Saves time. Makes money
The goal of every organisation is to run efficiently and increase earnings. This can be particularly challenging when developers spend around 50 per cent of their time reworking projects, causing timelines to stretch out and costs to expand. If only there were a way to work more efficiently with a clearer idea of what the customer wants. This is where UX designers come in.
Understanding the customer needs before creating the solution is critical to minimising rework time and launching solutions that are known to be what customers want. This is what helps UX to yield big returns on minimum spends.
Keeps you ahead of the pack
Customers today expect great experiences. You can see why UX is important when you think of dealings with a government department. You quickly realise just how spoiled you’ve been with tech platforms and their great UI and customer service turnarounds. Tech giants have raised and will continue to raise the expectations of customers.
UX allows businesses to learn and keep up to date with what their customers need and want to improve their experience. As an example, Time.com found that infinite scrolling could help them reduce their bounce rate by 15 percentage points. Adopting this change keeps them ahead of the pack and boosts reader satisfaction.
Uncovers new opportunities
When listening to your users, you find that they are telling you all sorts of valuable insights that can be turned into potential product opportunities or ways to increase revenues by improving experiences.
In the case of ESPN.com, revenues jumped 35 per cent after they listened to their community and incorporated suggestions into their homepage redesign. This is why UX design is so powerful.
Influences customer behaviour
Crafting experiences for customers, requested by customers, can help to influence them, be it to make a purchase or to become an advocate of your brand. At the basic level, merely looking at the UX design of a website can dramatically change a customers experience. After all, 75 per cent of judgments on website credibility is based on a website’s overall aesthetics.
For Bing, UX helped them to discover that a particular blue, as opposed to some other hues increased their conversions, resulting in an additional $80 million in annual revenue!
UX design makes the complex simple
Most solutions today are complicated. Think of our phones, for example. If a manufacturer were to promote phones based on all of the backend technology and specs that make them up, most users would be scared away from these complicated pieces of hardware.
Despite being more technologically sophisticated than ever before, marketing for phones will usually focus on what great pictures can be taken and how the phone looks as an accessory in the users day to day life. These marketing strategies are determined through UX design, learning that complicated tech talk will scare users, whereas lifestyle marketing will attract them.
UX Impacts in Real Life
Of course, the experiences of Bing, Time.com and ESPN.com may seem too far away and hard to relate to. So, how about a local, Australian example?
In need of an online vehicle storefront and quoting system, SG Fleet Group Limited — a major player in the international fleet management and leasing industry — sort about engaging 4mation to provide a solution that met their needs and offered a simple, intuitive user experience with a strong emphasis on performance.
The solution was a large-scale API-driven single page application with responsive UX design and performance optimisation. And the result was a 500% increase in quotes.
No matter who you are or what you do, investing in UX design means driving significant results.
Why not get in touch with the team at 4mation to learn more about what kind of exponential growth we can achieve through the implementation of UX design.
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