If your business has a website, application, or product, chances are you’ve heard the term user experience. What most people don’t realize is the added benefit of strong UX designs and why it’s important to invest in UX from the very beginning.
So, what is user experience?
Just as the term suggests, user experience, or UX, relates to the user’s experience when using your site, app, or product. In very simple terms, UX design is meant to make websites, apps, and products easier to use. This makes usability the centerpiece of a good UX design. Having good UX design has a largely positive effect on your brand and your business. When you have a good understanding of your users and journey they take while using your site, application, or product, you can use that information to enhance user experiences with you through good UX design. If you don’t have a UX designer in house, it might be time to start thinking about investing in a UX developer.How do you know if you have good or bad UX design?
The first step in determining if you have good UX design is to observe your users when they interact with your site, app, or product. Assessing the usability of your site is crucial. We recommend you monitor and analyze usage metrics, such as time on site and bounce rate, to identify usability issues. There are a number of metrics to consider and many ways of going about identifying issues. We recommend at a minimum to have Google Analytics installed on your site so that you can view a number of usage metrics. Some other tools that can help you pinpoint low hanging fruits are heat maps and user surveys. Once you’ve identified issues, you can carry out user testing, which will help you better understand these issues. User testing, as the name suggests, is a method of testing the usability of your website, app, or product. Typical user testing involves a pool of subjects or end users. Each is asked to complete a certain series of tasks. These tests record the end user’s interactions with your site or product and reveal the specific areas that lead to poor usability scores. We spoke with Marshall Serlin, Director of User Research at UserZoom, to understand how user testing can positively affect your UX design.“Research is a huge component of UX design – without research, you do not have UX design. In the world of UX design, user testing is the primary method of performing that research,” he explained.
What can good UX do for my current site, app, or product?
As you begin to optimize your site or product to enhance the UX, you will start to see positive changes in a number of areas. Here are some improvements you may see:
It can boost performance metrics and generate more revenue.
If measured correctly, KPIs, or key performance indicators, can provide some of the strongest insights into performance. In addition, they can help to reveal low hanging fruits. From a UX design standpoint, this is where decisions are made. Let’s consider a medical device company in California that recently underwent some UX design changes to optimize their site and improve KPIs. A few months ago, MFI Medical Equipment noticed a significant drop off when looking at their cart abandonment rate. They were experiencing a healthy add-to-cart rate of 2.5% of their visitors. But they were averaging only 0.7% conversion rate. So for every 1000 visitors, 25 of them placed items in their shopping cart, and just 7 of those 25 went on to complete their purchase. There was clearly a problem that needed to be solved, and the first place they looked was the cart page. With the help of heat maps, they noticed that almost half of the users that landed on the cart page were not even seeing the checkout button on their displays. It turns out, the checkout button was too far down on the page. Their developer fortunately had UX design experience and made the necessary design changes to bring the checkout button higher up on the page. Over the next 4 weeks, they experienced a 36% improvement in conversion rates from 0.7% to 1.1%.You’ll develop more loyal customers from users that revisit your site.
If you consider the amount of money your company spends on advertising, it may be time to consider investing in UX. This could say you more money rather than paid advertising, to accomplish the task of generating loyal, repeat customers. When your site has good user experience design, your users are more likely to return to your site. Return visitors can lead to repeat customers, and this means you’ll see improvements in customer lifetime value. It’s important to have your analytics software measuring the rate of return visitors and repeat customers. This you can observe the changes in these numbers after enhancements to your site have been made.What now?
If your site or product was built without end users in mind, then you have some UX improvements to make. And you might want to invest in a UX developer or designer. It’s important to find a designer that has UX design experience. Small adjustments to your site or product can drastically improve usability and user-friendliness.As Marshall mentioned, “when you invest in UX, you are investing in your business.”
