If you’re a business owner, you’re working on your start-up or think to start your business soon, or maybe you’re studying UX Design, it will be a great idea to spend a couple of minutes reading this article.
So, to ensure that we will be talking about the same… What is UX Design?
Briefly, we can define this relatively new discipline as the field that studies the relationship between the customers and the product.
UX Designers are user-center, which means that all decisions turn around the users and how they interact and feel with the product.
*A product can be any service, website, app, or phisical product.
It sounds weird, don’t you think?
Let’s go to talk about the business… (Income, money, net profit…) because, we can have the best product ever, beauty, with a good social cause, but it isn’t profitable it will die soon or burn a lot of amount of the money.
Therefore, what is the role of a UX Design?
I’ll give you an example, imagine that you want to build an incredible hotel in a nice place in your city.
You have 2 options:
- Find builders and say them to start the construction, and you will planing how it looks and the distribution of the hotel while you’re building.
- Hire an architect, to planning and ensure how this project will be built, and you can request changes on the paper. These reviews will be cheaper and easy to do on paper than in the construction itself. Don’t you think?
The smart decision is clear, we don’t need to spend a lot of time and money working without a plan.
The same happens with digital products, if you don’t know about your users and what they need, you will be working and building a project that in many cases the users don’t need.
We can summarize this in 2 words: time and money. This situation applies in any circumstance of your project. If you’re a beginner, or if you have the product created already.
Focus your time and money on your user’s needs! This will impact the engagement with them.
Remember that without users, we don’t have a business and our project will fail. It’s how to include heating in a hotel in the middle of the desert!
Benefits of include a UX designer on your team.
Here some reason to include a UX Designer in your project.
Reach the Product-Market Fit.
A good UX Designer should be working on this goal. When a product find their product-market fit, means that the service wins a space on the market.
What is it? It’s to create something that people love and want to use. So, if something happens to your product and users feel that they lose a powerful tool that means that your product reached this goal.
Let see an example; for many people the best way to communicate especially with people around the globe is WhatsApp, they find an important place in our lives. Usually, when we think about personal communication WhatsApp will come to our mind.
Nowadays, we need more than products, we need to solve and connect with users through the products and services.
In this case, UX Designers focus on the users, we study, listen and analyze users, so we can get the best ideas to improve the product.
Reduce the customer service cost.
Creating a good information architecture and intuitive navigation will reduce the number of people contacting support for help.
This impact customer support, so you can focus improve things that matter, and spend less time answering questions like “How I can do it?”, “Where I can find this”
Increase revenue.
This is obvious, if all processes are optimized, we increase the probability of increase our revenue.
We can think about a typical e-commerce
Here are a couple of important questions to think about.
How much time need a user to place an order? What are the pain points? Why users drop off the site?…
UX Design asks and answers these questions… our goal is to improve each area of the product.
I need to be clear, if users don’t understand your product, they leave it quickly.
In accordance with an article from Forrester Research, good work improving the checkout process can increase a 200% conversion rate.
Are you sure that don’t want to optimize it?
UX Design works together with SEO.
One of the most important rulers for Google, if that website gives users what they are looking for.
Of course, as UX Designer our goal is that users get what they need in an easier way. So, we great navigation and information architecture, help us to get it.
The bounce rate decrease and your ranking on the search result will increase.
Improve the engagement.
Maybe, you’re tired of heard about engagement, there’s a lot of fields that talk about it and it’s true, we need to be aware of how people connect with our product.
Remember the last time when you feel frustrated for bad service or for something that you didn’t expect.
In the most of the case, we find any other product to solve our problem and we will avoid the preview one. This impacts our brand and how it will be perceived by others.
Doesn’t matter if they improve the service later, probably we don’t give them a second chance.
Therefore, we don’t need to focus only on the product, instead, we need to see it as a combination of the product itself and all experience related (Before, during, and after.)
This impacts recurrency and loyalty. So, how many users use our product isn’t the only KPI that matters, we need to think about how they feel when they’re buying and when they have already the product.
Discover new opportunities.
Remember that UX Designer study users, so when we hear them, and implement UX methodology we can find patterns that give us a new opportunity in the market at the right moment.
This iterative process, allows us to find areas that nobody attends and we have the chance to solve it.
In conclusion, UX Design is more than pretty good designs and nice colors. Really good UX designers spends a lot of time learning about users and how to implement solutions that impact the business model.
Our goal is to get the balance between users’ needs and business interests.
For this and other reasons, if you want a scalable business or to improve your sales, you require a UX Designer on your team. I will be one of the more important roles in your business.
Credits:
Illustrations: People vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com
