As a consumer yourself, you have surely experienced the difference between great and poor user experience. Think about the last thing you bought online, how did you feel when you were buying it? Where you excited about it? Was it fast and easy to select what you wanted? Or did you feel kind of confused and frustrated? If you experienced the first, you surely came across a website with a good user experience.
User experience or UX is the process of increasing user satisfaction with a product by enhancing usability, accessibility, and the pleasure that interaction with the product provides. It focuses on having a deep understanding of users, their needs, what they value, and what they don’t. It also takes into account the business goals and objectives of the company managing the project.
Now, usually, when talking about user experience, we need to talk about the user interface (UI) however, as much as both are interdependent terms, they are not the same. While UX deals more generally with a user's overall experience with a brand, product, or service, UI deals with the interaction between users and computer systems, software, and web apps. In simple terms, UI is the point of human-computer interaction and communication in a device.
So now, what makes a good UX? And most important, why UX design matters so much? Well-executed UX needs to be responsive and intuitive, allowing technologies to be almost invisible so that the user’s journey feels pleasant and seamless. In other words, people should not have to struggle and wrestle with the homepage; rather, they should enjoy scrolling through and interact with the website or mobile app.
Logically, having a good experience as users makes us feel motivated to rather buy again or use a service over and over. It's not a secret that providing a good user experience is key to increasing conversions on a website and improving the retention of mobile app users. But let us tell you more about this, here are 7 reasons why UX is important for business.
1. It helps you stand out from the crowd
First of all, online presence has become a must for every business looking to succeed, and since the pandemic stroke of our world, being online is so important. There are many things you can do online to help you get your business out there but first, you need to learn how to deal with the inpatient modern Internet users. If your website or app doesn’t satisfy specific user requirements fast and easily, consider it a goner.
For example, people form 75% of their judgment on a website’s credibility purely on its aesthetics. That is why UX is a deal-breaker. Considering the number of people going online and the number of options to choose from, the conversion rate is crucial. Although there are different reasons behind conversion within websites and apps, a good UX does play a critical role as it can increase the trust of your users, and reduce bounce rates and time on page.
2. It’s the difference between keeping and missing clients
Rather you are thinking of designing a webpage or building a mobile app, you should maintain UX at the center of your mind. No matter the development process, you need to keep in mind that users should use the final product without any difficulties. Moreover, the designers and developers should understand the user’s main pain points and address them adequately.
Why? A good UX will make products and services easier and more pleasing to use, which is a game-changer that can turn website visitors into loyal clients.
According to Win the Customer, 86% of American adults would pay more for a better experience with a product and 89% switched to a competitor because they had a bad one. Therefore, if a website or product has an interface that is not designed to be user-friendly, customers will become frustrated. Many will even consider switching to a competitor. On the other hand, designs that allow a user to more efficiently and naturally navigate a service greatly increase the probability of maintaining that user.
3. It boosts costs savings
Launching a new product is risky by nature as it’s impossible to know for sure whether or not a project will generate the desired ROI. Luckily, good UX can help you reduce capital loss because it should involve extensive user research, wireframing, mapping of information architecture, prototyping, testing, and finally implementation. All of this results in a more accurate forecast of the potential return on investment of the next product.
Identifying potential issues can provide an estimate of the success probability and help you outline the steps you need to take to fix bugs before launching. In this way, you can avoid potential losses that would otherwise have occurred.
4. It makes our lives easier
It is true that UX goes beyond the digital world; people continuously search for the most effective solutions to their everyday problems in the products they choose and own, whether is a cellphone or a bottle of ketchup. The same applies to services, UX matters because we live in a world where time is gold and trade-offs are a necessary evil, so good UX, can help to save time and solve effectively a problem or need, making the consumer experience enjoyable.
In that sense, UX touches every aspect of our lives. From the products we use daily to the services we use, and, in our product-overloaded and overwhelming world, it is the differencing factor that creates meaning.
5. It maximizes ROI
Imagine spending a good chunk of your budget on driving target customers to a web app they will be unable to navigate, that would be bonkers! That is why UX design is important, especially in our modern pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models. A good UX will involve consulting the customer journey map (CJM), which will track down your users’ interactions with a website and highlights the obstacles they face. That way, you can identify if your users are struggling with the menu bar or are having issues with entering their contact information.
In this sense, having a good UX is crucial as an average of 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience, and 70% of online businesses that fail do so because of bad usability. The UX process will help to identify your project’s most pressing issues, allowing you to make changes accordingly to keep users on your website longer and convert them from leads to customers.
6. It boosts SEO rankings
Search engines are highly sensitive to UX as all are driven by the ultimate goal of providing the most relevant answers to users while requiring minimal effort to find them. UX improves a site’s findability and boosts your website’s ranking in the search result.
Also, people will normally find and access your site from different pages when they are searching, whether a home page, a specific landing page, or a link within a content piece. Good UX will make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site and find the information they are searching for. In this sense, UX will be a great way to keep leads engaged on your site. In other words, SEO gets traffic into a site, but UX keeps that traffic on it.
7. It enhances customer loyalty
Good UX strengthens brand loyalty. Why? Simply put, providing seamless and enjoyable interaction with a site promotes strong user activation. This in turn increases customer retention that eventually facilitates customer lifetime value.
The key element here is “comfort”. At a higher comfort or familiarity, interactions are recorded as positive, allowing a brand to stay on top of the mind of its clients. In this sense, a good user experience design will reduce confusion, which is likely to impact positively customers’ psyche, making them feel comfortable using the service or product and finally generating loyal customers and increasing user retention rate.
Finally, it’s clear why UX is important, not only help you reduce annoyed users, but will boost your brand in almost every aspect. Now, before you start your next app development project keep in mind the importance of making things straightforward, functional, and simple for your consumers; functionality is health. The best software has a great back-end as well as a great front-end. If you don’t know where to start, contact us at Intersog. We've got the tools and expertise to help you create an intuitive and engaging user experience that your customers will love and your competitors will envy.