Why you need UX Design
User Experience Design, more commonly known as UX Design, is all about building solutions and products around the users needs.
It’s the practice of designing for the users of a website, app or product. It ensures what you’re building has the users' experience at the forefront. Having great UX Design can help to increase brand consideration, improve rankings in Google, rate of conversion, as well as many other things.
Let’s take a look at why we need UX design.
Why your business needs UX design
Designing for your users is vital to make sure your website or product is as effective as possible. Making sure that you understand your audience and their needs means that their interactions with your design are going to be much more pleasant. When your users have an enjoyable experience interacting with your product, they’ll come back!
Check out our article on maximising your business value with UX Design here: How to maximize business value with awesome UX design
So, how does UX Design work?
UX Design is an iterative process (yep, it never stops!), and following these 5 key phases can help you:
Product definition: Understanding the problem at hand and what you as a designer are trying to solve
Research: Looking into competitors and understanding the users themselves
Analysis: Building out your ideal user or user persona to help understand who you are designing for
Design: Building a solution for the user whether it be an app, website or product
Validation: Gathering feedback and iterating on the product
The UX design process consists of seven key phases: understand, research, analyse, design, launch and analyse again. Image credit Nick Babich.
Increased brand loyalty and trust
Designing a product that users want to use through UX also helps build trust and loyalty with your brand. When a user can use your product without any issues and achieve their goals with it, there’s a pretty high chance that they’ll come back and use it again.
The perfect example of great UX benefiting a brand is Google. How simple is it to just type in whatever you’re looking for, and then be presented with options that are close to you and relevant to what you’re after?
These days people have coined phrases like “just Google it” and “I’m just Googling something” which sounds like brand trust loyalty and trust to a tee.
Google have a 90% market share in the search engine market, and 94% of search traffic on mobile and tablets all comes from the Google search engine. Again, it’s a perfect example of building brand loyalty and trust through positive user experiences.
Should you not provide a good experience for users, they know they’re just one click back to google to their next option.
Make fewer mistakes
Money talks and making the mistake of implementing something without proper UX design can be a very expensive mistake. Imagine trying to build a house and not using the architects plans that have been given to you, sure, the house will get built but it’s not going to be anything like what the customer has wants or needs, and it’s going to be a pretty expensive mistake to fix. There’s no difference when it comes to building an app or product without UX Design.
Increased ranking in search engines
Google favours websites with great design. Things like site speed, the responsiveness of your site and mobile capabilities are all factors that Google will look at and favour in the way of SEO.
Research by Google says that 53% of users will leave a website on mobile if it hasn’t loaded in three seconds, which is going to result in lower SEO rankings. Making sure that you have quick load times results in good user experience which is going to keep users on the website, which helps with your rankings on Google.
Having a responsive website also helps with your SEO rankings. A responsive website essentially means that you build one site that can fluidly adapt to different devices. Gone are the days of entirely separate URL’s for a ‘mobile site’ which would then cause issues with duplicate content, and traffic going to 2 different sites essentially.
Check out our article on User Experience and SEO:User Experience and SEO = Success – Traffic growth the right way
Increased conversion rates
This ties into the brand trust and loyalty piece we spoke about earlier. If you have a product or website that people trust when they’re using it and want to stay loyal to your brand, they’re going to keep on coming back for your service.
If users go to your site and don’t have a great user experience, they aren’t going to go through to the bottom of funnel pages on your site, which is going to result in a lack in conversion. UX Design helps navigate your users through the process of understanding your product, and then through to making a decision.
All in all, UX Design is vital for your business. Making sure that you are able to educate and guide your users through to the point of converting in a simple and enjoyable way means that they are going to come back and use or purchase your product.
