It’s a huge challenge for entrepreneurs in today’s age to stay ahead of the competition. If you’re a competitive business, you’re generally always looking to optimize processes - especially your sales funnel. The better you design it, the better your bounce rates and conversion rates will be.
User Experience (UX) design is an in-depth process of curating a compelling and engaging experience for your products’ users. It’s a unified way to craft your customers’’ interaction with a service from the first time they see it, to when they acquire it, how they use it, and how they will return to it (retain) in the future.
Although it’s common for people to refer to UX and User Interface (UI) design interchangeably, they are different, and often UX will carry more weight with consumers. Good UX design sets the groundwork for the effectiveness and practicality of a site or app’s UI, and so it is usually worked on before the UI is completed. UX plus UI, working together, tell a brand’s story and help deliver on its promise. That’s why implementing proper design is essential for nurturing relationships with your customer base.
In this article, we will share four reasons great UX design is a crucial part of growing your business.
1. UX design tailors your services to your customers’ preferences
You’ll always have to keep your target demographic’s needs in mind to design an attractive selling point. Besides the actual product you’re selling, you will need to consider the entire buyer’s journey, from education and decision making, through purchasing and troubleshooting.
UX designers focus on developing the user’s experience based on what they seek from the service - whether practical, efficient, or fun. There’s a wide variety of customers and an equally diverse number of products and services. Working with a UX designer who takes consumer motivation and psychology into account will make it easier for your brand to implement the right features for your target audience. It’s key to remember that while some things work well for particular audiences, others will absolutely fall flat.
2. Good UX makes it easier to attract customers
Marketing is all about showing potential clients what they can gain from your offering. UX designers help you use proper microcopy and visuals to answer the vital questions that customers may have when making decisions. They simplify the process of telling your buyers what your product does, how to use it, and why they should purchase it. They also can curate the information into a digestible format that your potential buyers will find easy to understand or interact with.
A designer experienced in UX research (UXR) will also help you build your product so it is best poised for adoption by your target group - whether they’re 85-year-old pensioners, 15-year-old video creators, or 40-year-old cyclists. Using qualitative and quantitative data, they will investigate habits, preferences, and predilections of your user group and be able to craft a tailor made user experience that is designed to please. Using interaction principles such as social proof and nudge theory, UX can also be crafted to amplify and support growth strategies such as influencer marketing or word of mouth.
3. UX optimizes your business’s sales funnel
After reading about reasons number 1 and 2, it should be clear by now why ‘UXers’ are awesome at troubleshooting, improving, disrupting, and creating sales funnels that convert well. UX designers do more than create the proper layout for your website or format for your brand’s packaging.They have a crucial role in the entire process of increasing your company’s marketability. From performing customer research to designing interactive prototypes, through exhaustive A/B testing of site copy, button CTA’s, even button colors - UX design can be infinitely and iteratively tweaked to provide better and better conversion rates over time. Through this rigorous process of testing and analyzing data, your UX expert and data team will join forces to increase your funnel’s effectiveness day by day.
4. Google rankings reward sites with good UX
In May 2020, Google announced that it would begin using UX criteria as part of its ranking algorithms. This is big news since it means that if your web presence doesn’t provide a good user experience, your website may not rank as high as it currently does. Luckily the guidelines provided by Google on the matter are straightforward and they state clearly what their standards of good UX include. While top quality UX contains a lot more than these items, Google’s criteria certainly provide a basic rulebook to follow for a good experience. They include these requirements:
Make sure your site is mobile friendly. (Responsively designed!)
Make sure it loads as quickly as possible - as measured by the Largest Contentful Paint. (An LCP of under 2.5 seconds gets a good score.)
Make sure it runs on HTTPS (which is more secure than HTTP)
Get rid of intrusive, content-blocking ads or pop-ups.
Make sure that the content doesn’t jump around as the page is loading.
You can check how your current site stacks up to the new requirements here.
Have I convinced you yet?
A UX professional helps you communicate your intended messaging to buyers, so your target demographic will find it easier to understand your USP - thereby increasing your credibility and building trust in your business. As a UX designer and researcher, I help businesses large and small with digital product development geared toward growth and increasing sales. Get in touch to brainstorm about how to improve your UX today. It’s often the simplest things - or the most low hanging fruit - that make the biggest difference to your bottom line.