Boosting profits and winning business through effective UX

Websites, mobile apps and other technology hardware can act as incredibly useful tools for use at work and home – and, at their best, they can take the form of truly inspiring experiences for users.

However, whether you are playing a game on your tablet, looking for information via a website or using a mobile application to create a piece of content for work, you are unlikely to be happy (never mind ‘inspired’) if the user experience (UX) is difficult, clunky or makes you feel like you would rather be using a different app, site or tool instead.

To put it simply, UX is how a user – who might be one of your customers or, at the very least, a potential customer – feels when they are engaging with your digital devices, websites or applications. UX is very closely related to customer experience (often shortened to ‘CX’) and it broadly covers the overall experience that a user has.

From usability to accessibility, performance, design and aesthetics, UX is all about putting the user’s needs and wants at the centre of the experience. Are users able to find what they want quickly and easily? Are there any ways in which the experience could be made better, more pleasurable or effortless?

UX needs to be prioritised just as importantly as visual design. After all, it’s no good having a beautiful-looking website or an eye-catching app if users get baffled or annoyed when they attempt to interact with it or get what they need from it! Ultimately, poor UX means customers will stop using your digital products and look for what they want elsewhere.

That’s why your visual designers need to work closely with user interface (UI) and UX designers in order to create and optimise the best user experience possible. But how do you measure the effectiveness of your investments into UX?

Effective UX: understand what customers want 

The great thing about UX is that it is measurable, and one is encouraged to use metrics such as abandonment rate, error rate and click rate. This data can give you a very good, well-rounded picture of the effectiveness of the UX that your products, websites or mobile apps are delivering.

And this is why UX designers are in high demand right now, with 87% of managers polled recently stating that hiring them is of high importance – which is on par with software engineers and higher than graphic designers (76%) and product managers (74%) – as businesses seek to ensure their customers and potential customers have the most positive experience possible with their websites and apps.

In the Adobe HR survey referenced above, one manager is quoted saying UX is “very critical for our [organisation’s] future,” with another saying: “UX review, prototyping and screen design are important to ensure the end product will not be met with resistance by the end users or even product failure.”

Additionally, 73% of managers surveyed said that they plan to double the number of UX designers in their organisations over the next five years. Why? Because being skilled with UX tools, having the ability to collaborate with the entire website or app design team and having great project management or project design tools means that you prioritise ‘what customers want’. The beating heart of truly great UX.

Right now, of course, most of the UX designers who are being hired by businesses are being employed to work on web design (65%), closely followed by visual design (61%) and mobile app design (54%) – though emerging platforms such as AI chatbots, virtual reality and augmented (or mixed) reality are becoming increasingly popular as the value of those technologies to the end user increases.

Whatever platform or technology you and your team are working with, it is essential to remember from the UX perspective that the customer always comes first. The UX designer is constantly thinking about new and different ways to enhance the customer’s experience, by looking at the overall value your website, app or other digital tools are providing to the end user.

Best practice: don’t follow trends, just keep customers’ attention

It’s also important to focus on your user’s specific needs and objectives, instead of following trends and hoping that what you are developing and designing will appeal to the user, purely because it’s a new technology or an ‘on trend’ design. That could pave the way to a potential UX disaster!

So, for example, right now there are many companies that are looking to develop AI-powered chatbots to help improve their overall customer experience (CX). However, the first question you need to ask yourself, before pursuing this type of project is simply this: ‘What specific purpose is this going to fulfil for my company?’

Technology is a fantastic enabler, yet you must always make sure that you are using it with a specific customer-based objective in mind. Intelligent chatbots, for example, can be created by UI and UX designers to engage with your customers in much the same way as if they were a human customer service representative.

They are a fantastic piece of technology, for sure. But will investing in one add to your brand goals? And will it make your customers want to come back for more?

The priority is always keeping your customers’ attention. Studies show that, on average, you hold their attention for only eight seconds. Plus, if they have 15 minutes to consume content, two out of three customers would rather read and engage with something that is beautifully designed. Which is hardly surprising! So why do so many companies still undervalue UI and UX?

Finally, think about storytelling and articulating your brands’ story through user experience, because whatever platform you are using, whether it is web, mobile, chatbot, VR or something else, if you are optimising your UX to ensure that it is wholly customer-centric then this is easily the most powerful way to tell your story to your users.

Ultimately, any consideration of CX has to involve UX. And providing you take a consistent, creative and strategic approach to UI and UX design, you will ensure your customers can find the information, products or services that they need faster, easier and in a more satisfying way then ever before.

Finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves that in a recent study, Forrester found CX leaders delivered compound annual growth rates of 17%, as opposed to just 3% of those lagging behind in the CX stakes. A focus on UX and customer usability will help your business deliver similar gains, so it is important to invest now and hold in high regard.

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