Growing into a successful business today, considering the growing competition and rapidly changing digital landscape, isn’t an easy task. It’s no longer enough just to come up with a great product or service. Today’s customers want more.
User experience (UX) design is what helps businesses bring more to the table. As marketplaces become more saturated and so many options become available to consumers, the user experience is what ultimately sets businesses apart.
Customer Retention and Loyalty
Did you realize that winning a new customer can be five times more expensive for the business than keeping an existing one? This underscores the importance of maintaining an excellent UX design.
By providing an intuitive and engaging user experience, you don’t just help improve the quality of one-time sessions but also build real brand loyalty. There have been multiple reports that confirm a strong connection between UX and customer satisfaction.
Customers with better user experiences often stay loyal to a brand, make more purchases, and even promote the brand to others in their network.
A great UX design also plays a pivotal role in lowering your churn rate. This rate represents the percentage of customers who abandon a purchase within a set period of time. By completing a UX audit and focusing on addressing user issues, you ensure your customers stay loyal and are less likely to look elsewhere.
Enhanced Brand Perception
Your brand represents more than just a logo or a catchy phrase – it’s the lasting impression customers have of your company. A lot of this impression hinges on UX design.
A positive user experience can improve your brand’s image, making it more trustworthy to others. But if users find your platform disorganized, it might cast a shadow over your reputation, no matter how great your offerings are.
With today’s never-ending brand options, customer perception matters. How people view your brand might just be the tipping point in choosing you over another lower-priced alternative.
Long-Term Cost Savings
Prioritizing UX design in your design ops can lead to substantial savings over time. This is largely due to two key factors:
- Reduced Redesigns and Critical Updates: Investing in UX design gives you a clearer understanding of user preferences. By tailoring your website or app according to these insights from the beginning, you inherently reduce the need for costly updates and major revisions down the road.
- Decreased Customer Support and Damage Control: A well-designed interface is straightforward and easy to navigate. When users find your platform intuitive, they are less likely to encounter problems, which results in fewer customer support queries. Additionally, a positive user experience minimizes the likelihood of negative reviews and feedback, reducing the need for damage control.
Increased Conversions and Revenue
If your service or product feels natural and straightforward to use, you’ve got a much better chance of winning over users.
When your site or application is fun to use instead of a chore, people tend to stick around longer. The longer they stay, the more likely they’ll do what you hope, like signing up for newsletters, making a purchase, or telling others about your brand.
If everything’s straightforward with your design and user can quickly get what they want, they’re also more inclined to trust you with their payment info, and that’s an important part of increasing your revenue.
Accessibility and Inclusivity
Now, more than ever, there’s a big push to make digital spaces welcoming for everyone. That means designing for everyone, from users with unique disabilities to those with different cultural backgrounds. Working with a UX consulting firm is one way to make sure you’re ticking both these boxes effectively in your projects.
Given that over a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability, being inclusive isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s also smart business. Designing for everyone doesn’t just help extend your reach, it also reflects well on your brand’s reputation.
SEO and Discoverability
SEO isn’t just a game of keywords and backlinks. It’s also about giving users quality content and a better experience. Major search engines like Google now favor sites that focus on delivering great user experiences when deciding how they rank them.
Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are a set of metrics related to site speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, show how important it is to prioritize user experience in website design. A well-designed and accessible website not only helps with discoverability but can also result in higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Poor UX design can lead to high bounce rates and other negative signals that hurt your site’s visibility in search engines. On the other hand, a strong UX design can improve these metrics significantly, improving your SEO and making your business more discoverable to potential customers.
Applying good UX design principles also helps ensure that your site is accessible and easy to navigate for search engine crawlers to index your site effectively. This increased discoverability can make it much easier for individual pages on your site to rank for relevant keywords and drive organic traffic.
Don’t Ignore How UX Design Can Benefit Your Business
A flashy website or application might grab someone’s eye, but if it’s difficult to use, you won’t get much benefit from it. People don’t have the patience for a challenging customer journey. If they can’t find their way around your site easily, they’ll likely move to a competitor sooner than you think.
By weaving UX design into every element of your website or app development process, you’re setting the stage for more memorable interactions. It’s those little moments that can turn casual visitors into long-standing, loyal customers.
Jinny Oh is a globetrotting entrepreneur, angel investor, and renowned UX professional with a passion for Design Thinking. Embracing a fully nomadic lifestyle, Jinny has founded WANDR, an award-winning product strategy and UX design firm that operates with a remote team of experts. With a diverse clientele spanning over 300 startups, US Air Force and Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Geico, and Adobe, Jinny has propelled WANDR to the forefront of the industry.
As an advocate for Design Thinking and Remote Work, Jinny has shared her expertise as a keynote speaker, equipping them with the skills needed to excel in the ever-evolving digital landscape.