6 ways UX adds Value to Business

We’re waving goodbye to the days of form over function. Spending money and resources on nailing good UX of your product is essential to grab consumers’ attention, but it’s only going to take you so far if the functionality doesn’t hit the brief. 48% of consumers consider design to be a key factor when determining a company’s credibility — and this expands beyond aesthetics.

And UX plays a huge part in the functionality. UX research focuses on understanding user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations through methodical, investigative approaches. These insights can then directly be used to ensure that all product design decisions benefit the users and the business simultaneously.

To make the biggest impact on the market, your product has to deliver the most user-friendly performance your team is capable of. So let us look at how UX increases the value of your business, and why investing in it is going to take you much farther than taking it for granted.

UX Research is a Data Goldmine

UX research is data. And data is money.

There might be times when the decision-makers decide to forego UX research to divert financial resources elsewhere because good UX costs money. If you are a decision-maker, it is a guarantee that you will be moved by tangible results and data to make the decision to spend a part of your budget on UX.

Ask for results in your language. It is understandable that you will remain unaffected by arguments like “UX research will help you build a product that users will love”. Why? Because it doesn’t speak to you. In turn, ask for the numbers you can expect if you invest in user research. “After making a particular change in this product which was defined by the insights from UX research, we can increase sales by 20%.” These are the types of results you can expect as UX will always give you data, which will help your team, or the team you outsource your UX research to, make positive, profitable changes to your product.

Good UX drives Sales

User experience has an impact, not just on tangible metrics like cost and time, but also on user satisfaction and happiness.

It’s no secret that users want products and systems that meet their needs, are easy and pleasant to use and are well made. Products and services that provide a good user experience will sell better than those that provide a poor experience. Ease of use and design quality have become selling points for giants like Apple, Amazon, Intuit, and others. With some products, such as software or hardware, customers don’t know what the user experience is like until after they’ve bought and started using them. While clever marketing can make companies get away with selling products with a poor user experience for a short time, dissatisfied customers, poor ratings and reviews, and negative word of mouth will eventually hurt sales. Unlike products that people buy and experience later, digital products like apps and websites are experienced immediately. So it’s extremely important that they provide a good user experience. A poor experience can prevent people from finding things, make onboarding difficult, or hinder them from making a purchase. If people have a bad user experience with your product, they will usually move to a competing product that provides a better experience, instead of figuring things out.

Good UX helps reduces Development Costs

Incorporating user experience design activities into the standard software development process would seem to add time and cost to projects. However, these activities actually save time and money by designing the right solution from the beginning and by finding and correcting problems early in the project, when they are easy and inexpensive to change.

The Systems Sciences Institute at IBM has found that the cost of correcting a mistake discovered after a product hits the market is between four and five times as costly as fixing one spotted during the design phase.

For an error identified during the maintenance stage, that cost difference can increase to 100. It is very convenient to prioritize efficiency over quality when the launch dates are inching closer.

But, numbers don’t lie. Even though investing in UX on the face of it might seem like a pricey investment, the cost of not investing in it at all is much higher not only in terms of money but also in terms of valuable resources and time.

Good UX defines your Audience

If you are devoted to your product and truly believe that it is capable of making great change and satisfy your user’s needs and goals, then UX is paramount to your success.

UX taps into the dynamic of human behaviors, needs, wants, and expectations. UX and human psychology go hand-in-hand, and any product that misses out on the chance of understanding the essence of its audience and their real requirements will always provide a less than satisfactory experience. When the user interface is designed by someone who knows and applies principles of human factors and design best practices, many UX problems will be avoided. Iterative usability testing and redesign finds and fixes problems and validates the design direction.

UX can also help turn brands into explorers. It opens up the floor to discussions on topics that are much larger than the specific product/service. This can lead you to stumble upon insights that would lead to discovering new, unexplored development opportunities for your product/services offered, and expand the scope of possible partnerships. It is only a plus point that by implementing them, organizations can also become thought leaders in their industry.

Good UX reduces Support Costs

Research has shown that companies that invest in UX see a lower support cost. When products are easy to use, users have fewer problems and have less need to contact support. Support costs increase when products have a poor UX design because more users need help.

The users require more contact support, which in turn means more support personnel to answer calls, emails, and answer telephone sessions. Good UX helps in avoiding the issues in the first place, so you won’t need to spend your budget on training, staff, and equipment to maintain a support center.

Good UX increases Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Good user experiences satisfy customers and increase their loyalty. Satisfied, loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, buy additional products, renew memberships, provide positive reviews, and spread positive word of mouth. Over 75% of consumers said they were likely to continue spending money as a result of an exceptional customer experience, while 82% would stop spending money with a company as a result of a bad customer experience.

Another study by Forrester Research found that a positive customer experience increases customers’ willingness to pay by 14.4 percent, reduces their likeliness to switch brands by 15.8 percent, and increases their likelihood to recommend a product by 16.6 percent.

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Good user experience has become the norm if you want to stand out. To remain relevant in the marketplace today, it is necessary to deliver a good user experience to your customers. The disadvantages are evident in all the businesses and products that don’t make it.

The key to a good user experience is to involve users throughout a UX design process, to observe their behavior, to design based on human factors principles and design best practices, and to test the design with them in an iterative design process.

Read our case study on redesigning a LMS platform and how the engagement rates pushed to 100%.

Don’t know where to start with your UX? Get in touch with us here, and let us take your product to the next level of usability!