6 Benefits of UX Design

If you’re a tech startup, or owner of a product and someone mentions to you that you need to be doing UX, you might ask 'why?' Is it just something else to be spending budget on with little ROI? What are the benefits of UX Design?

Or maybe you know the benefits but have a stakeholder group who are resistant to spending money on UX.

Here are 6 benefits of UX design to convince you and others that good UX really matters. To help you along the way, we have created a handy poster to help keep the 6 benefits of UX design at the forefront of your product strategy.

1. Spending money on UX now saves money later

Companies are recognising that it is far less expensive to prevent a problem or usability issue from occurring in the first place than to fix it later with a redesign. In Robert Pressman’s book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, the author further explains the business justification of an early focus on UX: “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development and $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release”. So every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100. While this may vary from product to product, there really is no better argument (Source: http://nlp.chonbuk.ac.kr/SE/pressman07book.pdf).

Further, 80% of the unanticipated fixes during development are issues stemming from the UI, while the remaining 20% are actual bugs (Source: Strategic Data Consulting (2009). Special report: UX business impacts and ROI). This indicates that a large chunk of fixes arising after a typical project could have been avoided through effective UX practices when undertaking User Interface Design; building the right product from a feature set perspective and then ensuring that the UI has been designed iteratively with a process involving some form of usability testing. Usability activities help you save by making changes later on when it's too expensive or too late. Getting early feedback from your target users—and making research-backed, user-centered design decisions—can help you avoid those expensive errors, saving hundreds of engineering hours and thousands of dollars.

2. Create the right product from the start

You’ve got an idea, a product you want to take to market, but are you designing something that’s meeting a genuine need? User experience from the get-go can help you confirm that you are designing the right product and provide insights into how the product should be shaped. Customer interviews at the beginning of a project can be an ideal way of understanding the underlying user needs and then concept validation can confirm and provide direction for the product as it takes shape. This can save time and money by creating the right product the first time and having the information to inform an ideal solution.

3. Increase Conversion

User research and data will give you real insights for improving your conversion rates (online purchases, registration, bookings etc.). You can find out where users are dropping out, frustrated, and where they have trouble understanding your offerings. Ideally, data from web analytics (and other sources) is combined with qualitative research techniques such as Usability Testing to ensure we have a holistic understanding of what users are doing and why. This ensures that we not only improve this conversion ‘today’ but gain the knowledge to design more effective solutions for tomorrow. The insights gained from research and data allow us to pinpoint changes required to impact conversion.

4. Improve self-service

You hope that your website supports customers to self-serve. Often customers prefer self-service and it keeps the bean counters happy with fewer calls to costly call centres. Surveys and user interviews can be used to identify customer's top tasks. Designing for these tasks is a sure way to reduce traffic to the call centres and save costs. Autodesk found that a two-day usability test and quick design change reduced the number of calls to tech support (Source: http://www.measuringu.com/blog/ux-roi.php).

5. User Experience is crucial to SEO

Search engines love great user experience! Google gives you a rating to improve results in both organic search results and with Google Add Words. The user experience of your site is a main part of their calculation for your rating. Have a poor user experience, Google will penalise you and you will either fall off the top page of results or be inefficient in your add words campaign. Ditto Bing etc. (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en).

6. Customer loyalty drive

User adoption is critical. Projects fail without happy users. Customers who have a positive user experience are going to be more likely to stick with your products—and to become your brand advocates. Investing time and resources into customer experience will help build customer loyalty. The advocacy measure, NPS, has been proven to correlate with usability. This suggests that products with high levels of usability are more likely to be recommended to others (Source: http://www.measuringu.com/usability-loyalty.php).

Read more:

3 tips for innovation

Using Lego in Design Workshops