The money you lose daily without knowing is like a quiet drip underneath your sink. Is it ‘just’ design?

User Experience (UX) Design provides the human experience in a world that is predominantly computer-based. It is a design approach that encompasses all the aspects of a product or service with the user. This means that a product is seen as a broad experience rather than just the underlying product.

We all know that at the end of the day money talks.

What UX does for your business? It saves the business money. Ignoring this aspect could be costly.

Why are designers so obsessed with this UX thing?

Well, why should any manufacturer focus on ease of use for their products? Because it reduces friction in the users’ experience and integrates smoothly in their daily lives. Good UX is the crucial factor in attaining user retention and loyalty. Without it, you have (at the very most) a beautiful piece of digital art.‍

Why doesn't my product sell?  ‍

The impact of UX on a product can be measured through different outcome KPIs, although the most relevant thing here is time: for completing various tasks, onboarding conversion, user engagement, user retention, user satisfaction, and organic user growth. It’s not a size fits all type of story, so it differs from industry to industry, market to market, stage to stage, and so on.

The impact can be seen through every little element that communicates something to the users. Whatever the product is bringing to the table for them, it needs to be clear in how it should be used.

The better the UX, the higher the above KPIs. With the potential exception of the time for completing a task, that one needs to stay as low as possible. Even here, sometimes taking longer is the expected desire for achieving a user goal.

By not taking UX into consideration you can lose much more than time and money. Although these are very important, as anyone might say. You can lose reputation and loyalty, those are pretty priceless.

We can look into this issue from three points of view:

• When we talk about time, we should focus more on time to product/market fit, which is essential in outcompeting your market and gaining a unique competitive advantage. Well, when you need to redraw the board again and again based on customer feedback, you lose a lot of time.
  

• Addressing the financial part, you can lose huge chunks of marketing budgets if you are efficiently drawing in potential customers that just don’t stick. Ask yourself, why don’t they stick? Bad UX might be the answer.
  

• Reputation and loyalty are earned little by little but can be lost in a second. Not being able to understand your customers and provide them with suitable solutions for their problems at the right time can result in forever lost users. And it can also halt or reduce growth. That’s something nobody wants.
  

What is the actual UX contribution to my business?

Charlie Claxton, Head of UX at Amazon said:

'Every dollar invested in UX yields a return between $2 and $100.'

That’s an ROI of 9900%.

These two statements are also confirmed by research performed by Forrester.

The best thing that UX brings to your business is constant and dynamic customer understanding. Of course, besides growing demand and user satisfaction rates.

Following a UX-first approach in your product development process can only make you empathize and think more as a customer. Knowing how to effectively do that is, in itself, a competitive advantage on the market.

User Experience can save you money in different ways:

1. Building on the right problem and solution from the ground up can be done through user interviews, focus groups, and other methods of understanding the initial context.

2. Afterward, testing and iterating the proposed solution (BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION) with potential users can save many unproductive sprints that might result in something the market doesn’t want/need. Or at least not in that way.

3. During development, testing new flows or features with users before release can hugely increase the odds of actually delivering value.

Imagine that each investment made above can be in time, development costs, marketing budgets, investor meetings, or any other thing that comes with building a startup. Well, with UX you can considerably reduce the chance of failing by understanding from the get-go as much as possible what your users really want.

Do you want to shoot in the dark or have UX lighten up the room for you?

It’s really only a matter of probabilities. You are more likely to badly invest time and money if you don’t have a flashlight (UX) to help you navigate the market needs and desires.  

How do I measure the UX impact on my business?

1. Higher user engagement levels: when customers love your product, they’ll use it more and more.

2. Higher organic growth: when (1) happens, be sure that users are going to tell their friends about it. Wouldn’t you do the same?

3. Higher retention: when (1) and (2) happen, users will integrate the product into their daily lives.

4. Higher revenue: when everything above is checked, you are ready to get paid back the value you provide. At an accelerated rate.

If you want to avoid unnecessary work, just follow a UX-first approach to product development.

There are multiple methodologies that you can follow, but the core is in thoroughly understanding your users and building something that provides them with unique value as smoothly as possible.

At Linnify, we keep it simple, but always get the necessary insights for confidently moving forward with the users’ needs in our mind.

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Great UX designs speak for themselves through zero user guidance. The best products are used intuitively with no need for manuals or pointers, it just feels natural. And that’s why they become part of the customers’ lives, it becomes part of the normal.

You too want to simplify your customers' experience, create a design that matters, and set a product successfully on the market?

Andrada Farcaș and Adrian Miclăuș have joined their forces to create a design white paper to help individuals from all kinds of backgrounds to simplify their customers' experience, create a design that matters, and set a product successfully on the market. It’s called “Unleash your UX/UI design superpowers - Your essential handbook for generating the design that matters” and you should definitely check it out. It will cost you less to read it than it will if not.

Download the paper to learn more about UX UI Design.