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Converting UX Into Better RoI For The Enterprise

A good UX/UI design strategy can help propel business growth because it has shifted to a more personalized approach

UX

UI/UX design is immensely critical in the modern digitally oriented business world. Its primary focus lies in enhancing user interaction and in turn user satisfaction with websites, application, and devices. In other words, the goal remains in making complexities easier for the users to understand and use.

“Good design is good business,” asserted by Thomas J Watson, the second president of IBM, in 1973. He added that good design could materially help make a good product reach its full potential. This was decades before the advent of Apple, Google, and Facebook, hence the gravity of his words is fathomed more than ever before.

For instance, Jeff Bezos invested hundred times more in customer experience planning than advertisement campaigns during Amazon’s first year, while AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia famously credited UX for catapulting the company to earn $10 billion in revenue. According to a study conducted by Forrester, companies that invest in UX/UI incur lower customer acquisition costs and support costs, while garnering increased customer retention and market share. Their research further revealed that a well-designed user interface could raise website conversion by 200%, and better design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.

Following are some of the benefits that the enterprises can have with better UI/UX design:

•    Reduced redevelopment cost: A good UX/UI design is derived during the meticulous process of user research, information architecture design, wireframing, prototyping, user testing, and final implementation. These processes enable accurate estimation of time, effort, and cost required before the final implementation. The figures remain precise rather than giving room to rough estimates. The UX/UI designing process also help us avoid usage of any unnecessary feature in an app/website, therebydecreasing the risk of failed deadlines and blown budgets. The design process allows real users to react to the product. Hence, further decisions are based on facts rather than inclinations.

According to Adobe’s research, about 38% of people are likely to leave a website if the content or layout looks unattractive, given that both go hand-in-hand. Thus, the design process also enables companies to both test their content as well as derive content marketing strategies to complement the application’s design and vice-versa.

•    Increased revenue:About 75% of people judge a website based on its overall aesthetics. A user-friendly interface dictates users preferring one website over another despite effectively delivering the same content, products, and pricing. Hence, a good UX/UI design that fulfils customer satisfaction is more likely to convert customers. Apart from converting new visitors, a good UX/UI strategy involves ease of use, lesser steps, and easy to understand CTAs (clear calls to action) which efficiently helps in retaining existing customers as well

•    Improved user interaction: During the design process, UX/UI designers create user personas (for using the company app or website) including profiles of real people, personal information, biographies, and motivations. Hence, this enables personalized designs for the target audience, thereby inspiring users to browse through the company’s website or mobile app. This helps deliver relevant content to specific users. Therefore, pop-ups on certain websites like “you’ll also like these products,” “similar to the items you’ve recently viewed,” and “inspired by your wish list” help grab user attention. About 56% users reveal that they’re likely to return to a website that shows recommendations. In other words, a good design involving consistency, ease of navigation and comfort enables the company to increase the stay-time on their website, which can lead to product sales.

•    Customer Journey Map: UI/UX designers create customer journey maps (CJM) to analyse customer interaction with the product that begins from the first point of contact. They may be in the form of visuals or text, but the essence lies in increasing loyalty of visitors – by tracking customers’ interactions with content, satisfaction ratings, usability scores, and other relevant data. Hence, the metrics provide designers with the insights required for optimisation. This, in turn, leverages better user engagement and eventually gains their loyalty.

•   Improved word-of-mouth: This is among the most credible forms of advertising, when consumers begin to market the product for the company viz. a facet all enterprises hope to attain. UI/UX design stimulates word-of-mouth. Designers understand the importance of social sharing and thus display links of social media sites pertaining to specific target audiences. For instance, an art website would include links like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram rather than formal social media sites like LinkedIn. This increases the reach towards the target audienceand offers convincing value propositions. In addition, UX/UI solutions such as reviews, star ratings, and references like “people who bought this item also bought” gather the trust and engagement of customers resulting in increased average order sizes.

•    Accumulates resources: Good UX/UI design solutions help enterprises avoid wastage of human resources, time, and money. An instance of misusing such resources occurs when marketers and sales managers are hired to promote a product without investment in user experience that delights users. When importance is laid on a UX/UI design, such misuses can be avoided and thereby save upon the vital resources of the company – which can further be implemented in other growth areas.

Having listed the invaluable merits of UX/UI design for enterprise growth, it must be understood that certain investments are required to efficiently leverage the strategy. These must be made over three phases, namely research, including focus groups, surveys, eye tracking studies, A/B testing etc, design including interpretation of research and analysis, customer personas, and other elements of designing process and development including building and implementing changes. In addition, having the right development, sales, and product use metrics in place is equally important. The narrower the metrics, the easier it is to analyse the ROI of usability investment.

The importance and focus laid on customer experience is more today than ever before in an enterprise set-up, where the primary agenda for these companies is to save cost and increase the ROI for customers and brands alike. Hence, user acceptance and satisfaction is critical to any product, project, or service. A good UX/UI design strategy can help propel business growth because it has shifted to a more personalized approach. UX/UI is one of the best route to harness brand recognition and loyalty in today’s day and age.

(The author is Co-Founder and Business Evangelist, Techved Consulting)

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