Why UX Design Is Important and How Businesses Can Benefit from It

The app or site’s first experience plays a crucial role in creating the overall impression. Convenient and functional user experience design will make users stay and continue using a product. If UX is badly created, users will simply go to competitors.

So, why is UX design so crucial for creating a functional and suitable design for a website or an app? Let’s find out!

What is UX design

User experience design is a multifaceted concept that includes many disciplines: interactive map, information architecture, visual design, readable text, interface responsiveness, usability, and interaction between a person and your product. UX is responsible for the experience that a customer receives from working with a product.

Top 3 reasons to invest in UX design

Do you still think that investing in UX design is a waste of money? Then here are the three reasons that will convince you to reconsider.

Reason 1. Improve ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is a ratio that shows the profitability or loss of investment; in other words, the payback factor. This metric helps the business determine the most profitable investment strategy.

Here’s how you can improve ROI when investing in quality UX design.

Decreased cost of development

A UX design process starts with the research of the audience, market, and competitors of your product. By understanding what the audience needs are, you can find out which features they expect in the product and save on unnecessary functionality.

Advanced customer experience

The quality of the customer experience of your product is key to the growth of your customer base. Сreating pleasant user experience for your clients will keep your user satisfied while satisfied users spread their thoughts about your business to others. That’s free advertising!

Research shows that companies that provide superior customer experience get 4–8% higher revenue than their market competitors.

One of the approaches to provide your customers with great user experience is to collect feedback from customers, analyze it, eliminate errors in your product design to improve the usability of your product.

Minimized cart abandonment rate

A lot of consumers leave their shopping carts, and online store owners simply don’t know how to return them to the store and encourage to complete a deal.

Here are the most powerful UX techniques that will help you reduce cart abandonment rate:

• Smooth checkout

Allow visitors to shop as guests without registering or creating an account. This helps users make purchases faster and more efficiently without a need to spend their time on the tiring registration process.

• More payment options

Provide visitors with several options for payments in your online store. Offering a variety of payment methods reduces the risk of cart abandonment, as a user can choose a convenient payment option.

• Social proofs for better trust

Among such a large number of online frauds, social proof, and signs of trust will enhance a trusting relationship between your customers and your business. Social proof can be different, like customer testimonials, results in numbers (amount of sold products or a number of customers who used your services), and the possibility of returning a product if a consumer doesn’t like it. Users feel safer and purchase more without fear of being cheated.

Increased revenue

According to a HubSpot study, 76% of users believe that a quick and easy search for the right information or product determines a good website design.

Focusing on functional UX design development, you can create a truly successful and profitable project. Here’s how thought-through UX design can increase your revenue:

• Enhanced experience of interaction with the product. Designers study the target audience, determine the mechanisms by which visitors interact with the product, develop well-considered solutions for the target markets.
• In-depth data analysis to determine design priorities. UX designers use behavioral factors, thermal, and scrolling maps to analyze the interaction of a visitor with page content. UX designer studies the experience and pain points of clients to create a product that solves problems.
• Better personalization. UX design task is to anticipate the needs of visitors and simplify the process of making decisions about buying. According to studies, businesses that personalize the operation of their product increase their sales by 19%).

A well-thought-out UX helps to anticipate and prevent the appearance of all problem areas in user flow, thereby ensuring better revenue.

Reason 2. Improve SEO

More and more entrepreneurs are aware of the effectiveness of search engine optimization and reasonableness of investing in SEO. Why is SEO so important for your website? Here are a few reasons:

• SEO is always relevant. It is unlikely that SEO will stop working soon. To some extent, even the search for audio or video content is affected by keywords, as well as when searching for text information. This ensures that SEO methods are valid regardless of the period of their existence.
• Search engine optimization is cost-effective. Search engine optimization has captured a significant market share. Compared to other marketing methods such as social media promotion, PPC, or email marketing, SEO pays off entirely. It is profitable to invest in it.

How important is SEO for your site can be easily shown by the statistic. 75% of users never browse sites except for the first one that is shown on Google’s request. Impressive right?

But how does UX design improves search engine ranking?

• UX design allows for reducing the bounce rate. The bounce rate has a strong effect on your site’s position in the Google search engine. A well-designed UX eliminates site errors, irrelevant content, slow loading of a page, or confusing design. The lower the bounce rate is the higher your overall search rating.
• UX design allows to increase dwell time. Dwell time is the amount of time that users spend on a particular site. The more time users spend on a website, the better it is for your site ranking. Involving users in your website is directly related to the UX design. If the navigation, content, and functionality are focused on usefulness for a user, they will spend a lot of time on your site.
• UX design promotes user-friendliness. The aesthetics of your website is equally important to SEO. Сorrect UX creates easily perceived content, multi-format headers (Head 1, 2, 3), the right CTA, and much more, which allow your site to stay at the top of Google search results for a long time.

Reason 3 Make your product unique

Despite the millions of existing applications and websites, you can still create something that users will love. The main thing is to stand out from the crowd and be unique. UX helps create a unique product that customers will feel like home.

Here’s a case study of Uber Eats and its success story.

There are hundreds of delivery services nowadays. But the one that has always been on top is Uber Eats. The application is unique not only because it allows customers to order any food in one click and track it in real-time, but also because it helps restaurants to improve their business and attract a lot of new customers. So what made Uber Eats unique? We believe it’s Uber Eats’ UX design.

To stand out from its competitors, Uber Eats added some exclusive features. Here are some of the most popular among users:

• Orders in advance. Uber Eats allows users to order food in advance, even in a day or week, and allows them to track orders throughout this time.
• Order anywhere. A user can order food anywhere and does not have to worry about going somewhere and picking it up.
• Access to comprehensive information. If a user is a vegetarian, they will be offered an exclusive non-animal dish. If a user eats gluten-free food, the app will also take this into account and show only gluten-free food. Users can also find out information about all food components, cooking time, and calories.
• Notifications. After a user makes an order, they receive notifications about the stages of order preparation and delivery.
• Personalization. The application shows nearby restaurants from which food can be delivered based on users’ locations. Uber Eats also makes a list of dishes that are likely to please a user based on their previous orders. In this way, users get a personalized attitude and convenience of orders.

After we find out how much UX audit affects the quality of the product, let’s talk about how to create a good UX design from scratch.

UX design best practices

How to create a UX design that is useful, relevant, and can satisfy your users’ needs? We’ve put together some of the most useful tips:

1) Research before design

Until you get to know your users, their feelings, problems, and desires, you will not be able to create the desired application.

UX research allows you to understand how a product or service will work in the real world for real people. This is the process of learning how users behave, their needs, and how they relate to your product. To do this, use the observation method and various feedback collection tools.

Why is UX research so important?

You put a user first when you conduct research and, based on it, create a project that will help users solve a problem or find a way out of a difficult situation.

First of all, your product should be convenient and understandable to the target audience, and not to you (well, unless of course, you also get into the target audience of your project). To make sure that you conduct research focusing on your users, use the Golden Circle concept. Ask three essential questions:

1. Why do we achieve this goal?
2. How do we achieve this goal?
3. What will be the result of achieving this goal?

Thus, it helps you create a unique selling proposition and better understand your potential customers, please them with your product and solve their problem.

2) Design a product with a full user journey in mind

A user journey reflects how customers interact with your product from the first moment until they close your app or site. A user experience map helps you sketch out the UX design and predict potential interference problems before creating an actual site or prototype. It is important to see the big picture before starting development or even design. This can be a great exercise in identifying the hurdles your customers are experiencing if you already have a product.

The user path map shows consumers’ needs, their expectations and desires, and their potential paths to achieving certain goals. This is similar to a behavioral pattern that determines how a customer can interact with your product or service.

A good understanding of customer flow provides the following benefits:

• Seeing the overall picture of the user’s journey;
• Establishing the interaction of design, technical and business teams;
• Optimizing UX by identifying and eliminating negative experience;
• Finding customer dump points, considering solutions for their return;
• Improving user journey design.

3) Provide users with freedom and control

Users need to have full control when everything that’s happening when they’re using your product.

Make all the actions in your product reversible, so that users can cancel the previous action and return to the previous step. This helps avoid user failures. Their mistakes can be easily undone, which allows them to get to know your product better. Add the cancel buttons and the cancel confirmation buttons to your interface so that users can accurately confirm the cancellation of their actions.

Let users find answers to any question about the software and how to use it. Provide your users with documentation so that they don’t get confused using your product. Highlight the self-help area in your product, with answers to the most frequently asked questions. This helps users quickly deal with the same difficulties as previous visitors.

Another excellent way to increase user confidence is to use live chat, which immediately pops up when opening your site. In case of problems, users can get answers to their questions or solutions to their issues in real-time.

4) Perform user testing

Testing is your key to successful communication and bringing information to users correctly. Testing is not a one-time thing. If you want to improve your product and make it as useful to a user as possible, then you need to test every element of your product to reduce errors and eliminate defects. Test results usually lead to repetition and investigation of problematic aspects of your product. Test and improve your product over and over again, and your users will be happy!

Wrapping up

It’s worth saying that no website or app can exist without a functional and usable UX design. We hope this article was useful to you and helped you find out what’s UX design and why it is important.

Our designers from Gapsy Studio will be happy to help you fulfill your dream and create a functional, cost-effective product that won’t be left without attention. Check out our works on Dribbble to be sure that we are experienced in design, and thanks to the variety of our services, we can handle any of your ambitious desires.

Originally published at gapsystudio.com