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Bad UX Will Cost You More
Companies are always striving to save up their money before creating their products. According to McKinsey, 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated. Although it may seem that working on UX (user experience) is not so critical and essential at the initial stages of product development, it is a misconception since a poorly designed UX will definitely affect your customer engagement and experience. In order to be separated from a competitive marketplace, it is of high importance to provide excellent user experiences to customers so that they are willing to select your product and service. Until users begin to complain about products, companies tend not to overthink the impact UX can bring to their business performance and ROI. There are two scenarios of users’ complaints:
- They just leave your website/app and never get back.
- They provide bad feedback.
In any case, you will be way behind the eight ball. According to a former Gartner analyst Esteban Kolsky, 91% of those who do not complain just leave, and 13% of them tell 15 more people about the bad experience they got. Customer experience is an essential part of customer loyalty. You might be wondering where the place for UX in here is. Before we dive deep into UX best practices, let’s consider the difference between UX and CX since these two notions are tightly connected.
UX vs. CX
User experience relates to a user’s interaction, specifically with your product (app/software) and the experience he/she gains. Moreover, UX is geared at creating intuitive, user-friendly designs, with superb usability, information infrastructure, comfortable navigation, etc. User experience success indicators are measured through such metrics as success rate, abandonment rates, clicks to completion, task times.
In contrast, CX is focused on overall customer satisfaction via their interactions with the company. It is mainly concerned with users’ perception of all touchpoints and social channels; hence, they get a whole picture of how a brand is positioned.
Therefore, UX is an extremely influential element of CX. However, by getting a good UX, a user isn’t always satisfied with company service in general. Let us give you an example. Let’s say you are going to order Nike sneakers via the online shop. The website navigation is seamless; product recommendations and customer reviews are personalized to your needs, making you comfortable during decision-making. And just in a few clicks, you made a payment and waiting for your new purchase. Brilliant!
You are delighted with the experience you’ve just got on the website. However, after having received your package, you found your product, not the same you had offered. Your actions? You might call a support service to figure out whether you can exchange this product. But, let’s imagine, this process took you several days to be carried out. Regardless of the great UX, you get on the initial stage of your order, you are unsatisfied in the long run with the service (CX) you got. Eventually, UX has a significant impact on your CX; however, customer loyalty depends on both notions. So let’s move forward and reveal the main secrets of the successful user experience.
Why Does UX Matter?
Let’s highlight the main advantages your business can gain and how UX can impact your return on investment:
- Once you make thorough research on market needs, you need to create a tailored UX for your customers so that there will be no need to make redesigns. As a result, you will reduce long-term development costs and time.
- UX helps increase conversions and customer loyalty, leading to a higher ROI score as well.
- When your product’s usability is seamless, your users will not need to address the support team to figure out issues.
- Smart UX provides users with a simplified process to move forward to purchase decisions. Moreover, they will not wait for the issues to be figured since, with the plethora of solutions on the market, they can easily select another product with better UX.
- Employees’ satisfaction also has a significant impact on the financial state of the company. With better UX opportunities in their work routine, employees get more efficient in accomplishing their tasks.
- UX customer journey maps help increase customer loyalty and retention sales.
UX Principles You Need to Follow
Focus on the following principles of a solid UX if you want to enrich your product development strategy eliminating the risks of product failure:
- Usefulness. Your product needs to have a purpose, and only users can help you define what is really useful for them.
- Usability. It is crucial to incorporate feedback from your users to measure the usability of the product and iterate design accordingly.
- Speed. Your product design has to deliver high performance to indulge the users with fast interactions on the web page/mobile app.
- Trends. Customer-centric, up-to-date, and modern UI/UX will empower your users to buy more.
- Simplicity. Abundant features and functionality can overwhelm users who seek simple, accurate, and user-friendly solutions.
5 Essential UX Techniques to Improve Your CX and ROI
Outlining the importance of UX for the improvement of customer experience, we can proceed with the fact that investments in UX techniques will bring much value to customer loyalty and, subsequently, will have a positive impact on your company’s ROI.
According to research, on average, every $1 invested in UX brings $100 in return. That’s an ROI of a whopping 9,900%. One more interesting fact is that a software/app with a solid UX design will convert up to 400%.
So it is highly recommended to leverage user experience techniques to achieve high returns on your investment? Here are the main ones:
User’s Research and Analysis
Based on field studies and users’ research, you might want to portray your user personas, outlining their peculiarities, behaviors, and needs to capture valuable insights. Creating fictional characters is a powerful way to observe and predict the expectations of potential consumers. Such a method can help perceive your product from a user’s perspective. Once you gathered factual information regarding your user persona, you can proceed with a customer journey map to make the users’ profile finalized to minimize the risk of incorrect estimates about their behaviors. If you know how to create a customer journey map, you will be closer to crafting a tailored product.
Rapid Prototypes and Wireframes
To demonstrate the key interface elements of the web page/app, your design team has to create a layout: low-fidelity wireframes or hi-lo wireframes, aka rapid prototypes. What type of wireframe to choose depends on the purpose of your design and the need of team members. Low-fidelity wireframes are focused on presenting the design through basic layouts, whereas high-fidelity wireframes are advanced prototypes saturated with visuals and interactions that are close to the ultimate version of the product.
Usability Testing
Usability testing is purposed to identify the product’s usability issues before it goes on a large scale and helps make corrections and modifications at the early stages of the product development process. Therefore, prototyping is a good way to be used for usability tests since design teams can fix issues before implementing the final product reducing time and cost wastes for development teams. For example, Amazon conducts permanent A/B testing to redesign their product tailored to users’ needs. And we will not tell you how successful this internet retailer is. According to Nielsen Norman Group’s research, you need only 5 users to engage in your usability testing. The more users you involve, the worse insights you get.
Examples of Best UX Designs
Zara
As we mentioned above, simplicity is one of the core principles of a seamless UX design. With straightforward, precise design and limited navigation, Zara’s website doesn’t overwhelm the visitor’s eyes. Excellent navigation makes the user feel comfortable and easy-to-go.
Amazon
Being one of the leading e-commerce websites globally, Amazon is distinguished from its competitors by its aggregated information and customized algorithms tailored to each user. At first glance, it seems that the website is somewhat complicated, but the nested information architecture makes it simple to the user. Personal recommendation, search-driven approach, rich user reviews – all these features contribute to positive user experience.
Rover
With an easy-to-follow interface, pet owners can easily find sitters or walkers for their pets. Users tend to skip too many data entries and get fast solutions to their search. On the Rover website, a visitor entering the main page just has to answer a few simple questions to proceed with the order.
Apple
Embracing innovation, Apple products are dynamic and highly interactive. There is no need for users to look for an item since a comprehensive user journey is created in a way users can get answers to their questions by scrolling down the page where the information is presented in a logical sequence. What makes UX brilliant is the possibility to select the best solution by comparing features. While comparing, you will not confuse the products since their names are fixed on the top.
How Can RewiSoft Help You Create a Solid UX Design?
The key to excellent user experience is human factors that need to be observed and analyzed to design a product that will hook their attention and satisfy their needs. Our design team incorporates top-notch technologies and trends to deliver best UI/UX designs for your products. Feel free to contact us – we will support you at each stage of the UX design process.
