How can UX Design boost your business?

According to the research lead by InVision, “The New Design Frontier”, leading companies are using design to drive efficiency, profit and position. Although many factors have shown to improve through design processes, the most remarkable positive effects lay on customer satisfaction, usability, revenue, conversions, and even team efficiency. 

This shows that successful companies are already aware of how much design can improve their business, and have already started to quantify those results. Most of those improved numbers are possible thanks to the UX Design creative process: the user-centred approach (understanding your audience’s true needs through research and testing); and the iterative process (make mistakes early so that you can redo whatever goes wrong with less effort and cost). 

In this article, I will show you 7 ways in which applying UX design can make your business skyrocket. 

1. Reduce development & marketing costs 

According to Robert Pressmen’s book “Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach”, “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, 10 dollars will be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply it to 100 dollars or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.” 

These numbers are easy to calculate when we know the fact that 40 to 50% of the developers’ time is spent redoing work, according to an article by IEEE Spectrum called “Why software fails”. When engineers get more clear directions of features and we know how the audience is going to react even before starting development, we can save a lot of developing time usually spent redoing flows that did not work out. Even though the initial design stage might take longer than expected, the cost of an additional iteration this early in the process is marginal compared to the cost of failure with this concept after launch. 

2. Improve conversion rate 

The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product they want, they cannot buy it either. That is where UX enters: not only by organizing the UI and the flows but by understanding early in the process HOW people are used to find what they want so you can provide this clean experience to them. Remember that if you fail to deliver an easy way to purchase anything you are selling your users will be looking for it somewhere else. 

According to the European Business Review, although a great UI is able to increase your conversion rate by 200%, a well thought User Experience can increase it by almost 400%. 

3. Reduce the cost of customer support 

The fewer the issues your users find whilst using your product, the less they will have to get in touch with your support. You can save your users a huge amount of frustration and use the support team’s time to solve actual problems, get feedback from clients, and even work on sales. 

One popular case is when companies make people get in touch with their support just to retrieve a password. If you note how long these calls take and how much they cost you, it will be clear how providing a good experience for this action can reduce your company’s cost with support. This study shows, through a hypothetical situation, how a company can improve their ROI (Return Over Investment) significantly just by providing a way for costumers to retrieve their password and order a second paying billet directly through their website. 

4. Reduce the cost of training 

This one might seem pretty obvious when you understand the reflexes of good usability. When your users can easily learn how and complete their tasks in your website or application, they will need less help to do it. This has a more visible effect when you work with an internal tool, needing to teach your employees how to use it. But if you don’t have an internal tool, you can see your costs scaling down as you won’t need to train your support team on how to use your product so they would be able to help your customers through their difficulties. 

5. Improve your SEO 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a practice responsible for improving your website rank in the top organic results, excluding the ads on top, in search engines like Google. This is achieved through a series of requirements the engines look at, and some of them are impacted directly by good UX: 

• Load time 
• Responsivity 
• Friendly URL address (short and meaningful) 
• Easy to understand copy, using the words your audience is used to in a simple way. 

Having a good SEO is important mainly because 75% of google searches don’t go further than the first page — people are content with the results they have found until there. Having to pay for ads on the first page might seem like a good solution, but this same research showed that between 70 to 80% of users tend to ignore the ads and jump straight to the organic results below. 

6. Increase brand loyalty 

We already know how a good UX can improve your conversion rate. But how does it keep people coming back to using your product or buying from you? 

Transparency is one of the key features for good loyal customers — it makes people trust your brand, either if they feel safe using your product or if they know that if something goes wrong, you will take care of it. A practical way of showing transparency is through a good experience — if your customers know where they are in your flows, have feedback for their actions, understand easily where to go next for what they want to achieve, and finally have a pleasant journey with you, they will trust your brand and come back because it made them feel good. This study by Forrester Research has shown that if you provide good usability, you have the power to get users 16.6% more likely to recommend you and 15.8% less willing to change yours for another brand. 

7. Increase the delivered quality and efficiency 

One of the best things about the UX process is that the initial phases encourage companies to invite all the team to participate in the creation of the product. It is essential if you follow the Design Sprint framework that there your engineers are participating too, not excluding the marketing team, the support team, and other people who will be working on this product. In fact, The New Design Frontier research by InVision has shown that 33% of companies have a proven impact of design in improving their team productivity. 

If the engineering team is also part of the creation and understands deeply the product’s users’ context, they will work much more actively in making good deliveries just because they actually care. It is much more pleasant and engaging to work on something you helped build rather than just executing tasks from a board. 

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I hope that these numbers can make the value of UX more tangible to your business. If you are not an entrepreneur yourself, take this to your leaders — this approach might be the final push your company needs to start thinking about UX! 

Featured Image from Freepik.