As we conduct more and more of our daily business interactions online, it’s never been more critical to offer users a seamless, frictionless digital experience that aligns with their daily lives. Users have come to expect an optimized user experience as a basic requirement, and it’s now become a prerequisite implementation strategy across all platforms and devices.
Clearly understanding why customers come to a site and what they need works in favor of both the audience and the business, providing brands with the rationale and pathways for optimized user experience. Companies now have the opportunity to impact their business more effectively by implementing targeted strategies throughout their market and its digital ecosystem.
Creative agency’s specializing in web design and UI/UX strategies, the focus is to deliver digital experiences that are integrated and comprehensive, delivering both content and conversion opportunities. Most business clients who engage for site design are looking for a revenue driving product, but few are aware of how much their business can change for the better with the right UX.
In a recent study from Forrester Research, a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%. Put simply, the metrics speak for themselves.
Understanding that UX design can dramatically change the face of their business is enough for some brands to convert immediately. But for those who are slower to adapt, it can take a fresh perspective with clarification, hard facts and an updated review of the digital environment.
Making The Case
When customers come to your site, you have only seconds to influence them; investing in UX optimization is necessary to quickly gain trust, brand recognition and ensure user retention. As a strategic design and brand content team, we know this to be true. Many businesses are tasked with the challenge of driving the importance of UX to multiple stakeholders whose focus is primarily on the numbers. In this case, a cost/benefit analysis incorporating statistics on UX ROI can prove beneficial in comparing before-and-after results against key performance indicators.
In Robert Pressman’s book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, an early business justification for UX is made that’s hard to argue: “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.” This is to say that every dollar invested in UX returns $10 to $100, and correcting the problem from the start is most cost effective.
A Strategic Approach
Determining which conversion and user experience strategies will work for a specific business can be daunting, but analysis is your ally. Often, companies will look to their competitors for ideas, implementing UX methods that may not be ideal for their own target market. The pathway to an effective user experience for your business begins by taking a comprehensive look at your business strategy. Understanding what methods to employ revolves around one thing: goals. Google’s HEART Framework is a valuable tool for a company in this pursuit. Helping to measure the quality of user experience, the HEART Framework prompts you to choose the right UX metrics for your product. Measuring several categories, among them happiness and retention, the tool “facilitates the identification of meaningful metrics you’ll actually use” and that will optimize your business.
The Payoff
One of our core agency benchmarks is to simplify complexity, and UX has become the embodiment of this mission. In other words, UX makes the complex easy to use. By implementing UX strategies, we can effectively improve how a company engages with its customers and interacts with its website via any device or application. This applies both to internal and external operations with companies seeing increased sales, lower cost of customer acquisition, increased customer retention, more market share and less training costs. Alternately, a user experience that is not optimized can decrease conversions drastically.
Whether a website, app or B2B tool, nearly every business with a digital presence across industries can benefit from the process of user experience. Delivering some of the most actionable insights critical to make informed business decisions, UX has the capacity to create new business models that go on to become a necessary part of our evolving digital landscape and everyday existence.
Read more at: forbes.com
