In terms of design, user experience is just as important as visual identity. Seriously. It doesn’t matter what your site or app looks like if people don’t know how to interact with it. And moreover, they need to enjoy that interaction.
While UX is important for any digital product, it is even more important for certain types of digital products: complex sites or applications, retail or online sales, start-up sites and businesses, small-budget projects and projects or sites that are expected to last a long time.
UX is key for complex sites because users must be able to easily navigate the site and understand how to use it. Neglecting UX can result in a sloppy site that people will not come back to. Developing an interaction-rich experience will drive users back to a site.
One of the most complex types of sites can be those that include retail or online sales. Not only does the site have to be well-organized, it also has to have clear and easy to use signals for how to make a secure purchase. This is also true of sites that are expected to be around for extended periods of time, such as retail sites. Consider Amazon.com, it has worked using the same basic UX for years.
User experience is key for small and start-up businesses as well because the site is their first impression to users. This debut matters when it comes to directing future traffic and business to your product.
This same concept applies to companies with small budgets. User experience is important because it can create the momentum that propels the business forward. Remember, users decide in just a few seconds whether your site or app is worth their time. That’s the only opportunity you get to reel someone in.
When it comes to poor user experience, the issues are noticeable. Think about problems reported with HealthCare.gov and subsequent self-reported issues: inability to compare plans before creating an account, overloaded servers and downtime, problems with account creation, difficulty filling out applications and not enough user testing. All of these problems create a negative emotional connection to the site for users.
Further, the Usability Professionals Association defines six key benefits to adding UX to the design and development process: increased productivity, increased sales, decreased training and support costs, reduced development time and costs, reduced maintenance costs and increased customer satisfaction.
UX is about two things only – the User and the Experience. Give your users a positive experience and they will reward you with their trust and their business. Companies with highly effective UX have increased their revenue by 37%, and top 10 UX leaders in America outperform the S&P with close to triple the returns – a significant lead. This clearly shows the ROI of UX design.
When experiencing your product leaves the user with a foul taste in their mouth, they will quickly take their business elsewhere. 90% of users reported they stopped using an app due to poor performance, and 86% deleted or uninstalled an app as a result of encountering problems with it’s functionality or design. Meanwhile, studies show that 86% of users believe an exceptional customer experience is worth paying extra. With these figures in mind, it is not difficult to understand why User Experience focused companies like Apple, Google, Adobe, Dropbox and Amazon are year after year leaders in their respective fields.
While having a great product is paramount, in today’s market it often is not enough to keep you ahead of the curve.
This is why investing into UX design has proved to be a game-changing strategy. A pleasing UX has been proven to earn the users’ interest, business, and most of all – their loyalty. 48% of users say that arriving on a business site that isn’t working well on mobile will be seen as an indication of the business simply not caring, and 52% said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company in the future.
The principle extends beyond just mobile devices; 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load, while 79% will search for another site to complete their task.
But what about design? How important is the actual aesthetic property of your website (or a product) when it comes to user experience?
An experiment conducted by M. Tractinsky tested relationships between users’ perceptions of a computerized system’s beauty and its usability. Its outcome showed that, undeniably, the role the aesthetics play in HCI design is a major one, and should be kept in mind at all times when catering to the users’ needs.
It seems safe to conclude that the business value of UX design is so colossal, one can simply not afford to ignore the importance of a highly skilled team of UX designers putting their expertise into crafting the experience your users are going to undergo and enjoy while engaged with your service or product.
With design focused on user experience, a company is forced to create for their customer. A relationship is formed and it grows, bonding the customer with the product. At UX Passion, this is exactly what we do; we help you put the customer in focus, and we do it with passion!