Great UX Design is a product feature that no business that wants to be successful should ignore. The user experience design of your product among many other things is one of your strongest competitive edges when you’re stacked up against a competitor, this is why being trivial and/or giving a backdoor or a side eye gaze to design may not be the most optimal thing to do when building and maintaining your digital products.
In one of our most recent pieces, we talked about what makes up great user experience design, and what you should look out for if you want to conclude a product is well or properly designed. In this piece, we’ll be answering a more pertinent question; what are the benefits of great UX design?. Everyone says you must and should employ design in your product development initiatives, but what are the true benefits of great UX design?
In this piece, we dive deeper and outline 4 clear benefits of embracing great UX design in your digital product development process.
The Benefits of Great Design
There are a number of benefits and advantages of embracing design in your product development processes; in fact, some of the most successful businesses in the world today from Apple to AirBnB to even Nike are outspoken design adherents, however, for the sake of brevity (and to avoid writing another Bible), I’ll limit the number of benefits of great UX to four.
These benefits include:
- Higher Customer Acquisition Rates
If you visit, say an eCommerce website to make a purchase, if the information architecture of that website is poor, clunky and not fluid, after jumping from page to page looking for the product you want to buy and not finding it, do you think youll convert as a customer? Definitely not. The customer acquisition rate of your digital products are largely dependent on the quality of the UX design of your site. If your marketing teams are doing a great job by bringing in qualified leads to view your website and see what your business does, if your UX/UI design is poor, there’s a high chance that these users will although visit the site, but based on their inability to properly and swiftly find the service feature they’re looking for, eventually leave your site and fail to convert.
Bad UX design makes it both challenging and difficult for users to find the exact feature they’re looking for and will eventually push most first time visitors to look elsewhere for who can solve the problem they came to your website to solve.
According to research by Forrester, a well-designed user interface has the ability to raise your website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, and great UX design could yield conversion rates of up to 400%.
Good UX design makes it extremely easy to locate stuff and make product purchases or use product features in an easier and more intuitive way. This kind of user experience will usually compel users to make purchases on your website/product instead of going elsewhere, thereby increasing your Customer Acquisition Rates, and reducing your Customer Acquisition Costs
2. Higher Customer Retention Rates
As much as Customer Acquisition is important, the Customer Retention Rate is one of the key indices to look out for while running a digital product. The Customer Retention Rate is the rate at which users who use your product stick to your product as against switching to your competition.
Bad UX design usually has an adverse effect on Customer Retention Rates. If a product has poor UX, more often than not, its users are really just enduring the product, and unless the business has some kind of lock in feature in its product that makes it difficult to port or jump ship to another business offering the same kind of product, there will likely be some kind of mass exodus of users of that product to a competitor in your field that offers a more pleasant User Experience.
If you used an eCommerce site that doesn’t allow you search for clothing items by filters, but leaves you only with the option of scrolling through a large catalogue of products on sale, and one of the main competitors in that space decided to put that filter feature in its own website, it’s only a matter of time before you jump ship to a more convenient product offering, and a better customer experience.
Remember, what you really sell as an entrepreneur is not really a product; what you really sell is the experience of the product, and how it helps your users and/or potential users solve the problems they face.
3. Higher Brand Trustworthiness
We don’t know (or trust) everyone on the internet, and most of your customers may even be visiting or using your digital product for the first time, so how do they know you’re not a scammer hiding behind an eCommerce site or any digital product to steal their Credit Card details or their user data? The better the UX design appears, the more trustworthy and authentic your business and brand looks in the eyes of potential users.
A poorly designed site can make your site look fraudulent in the eyes of potential users and discourage them from converting. Also, if your business has a suite of various products, bad UX can have an adverse effect on your brand image as a whole, consider this; if the mobile app or website of a specific brand frustrates you, how likely are you to use another product from the same brand?
However, good UX increases your brand trustworthiness across platforms and makes more people who have interacted with any other product in your ecosystem more than willing to interact with and use new products under the same brand umbrella, with the belief that the product experience will be the same.
4. Sets You Apart From the Competition
Very few companies are in novel or Greenfield territory, and as such there are a number of competitors in the field you already operate in. One of the ways to give your business and/or product a leg up in the market is to have a unique user and product experience.
What sets Apple’s iPhone apart from the plethora of Android alternatives on the market is its unique product experience. This is also the difference between AirBnB and its competitors, and a host of other design first businesses. Design and exceptional product and user experiences is a very strong and potent way to stand out in a crowded and over saturated market if that’s the market you find yourself in.
When users know that the customer and product experience of your product is top notch and one of the easiest ways to get the problem they use your solution for solved, they’re more than likely to gravitate towards your solution, and in some cases invite others to come with them. An exceptional product and user experience can act as a defensive and competitive moat that gives your business the leg up and positions it at the top of an already saturated market.
Conclusion
Great UX design will always be a competitive advantage and a game changer for any business that decides to embrace it wholeheartedly.
Embracing great UX design as part of your competitive strategy is not a decision any business has taken and regretted, we don’t think yours will be any different.
Got questions? Drop our team a line or send hi to team@charisol.io
