Why You Need User Experience Design

How Investing in User Experience Design Creates Happier Customers

In 1973 the second President of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, famously informed his Wharton students that, “Good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.” Watson's concept of a good design was later epitomized in User Experience (UX) design. UX design focuses on enhancing user satisfaction by enhancing how we, the users, interact with a website or application.

How User Experience Design Fueled The Rise of Today's Tech Giants

Apple, Facebook and Google wouldn't be what they are today without great UX design.

• Apple didn't invent the smartphone. What they did do was to create the easiest to use smartphone on the market, which drastically improved the user's experience and resulted in a practically overnight market take-over.
• Facebook wasn't the first social network. It did however see phenomenal growth by ruthlessly catering to a user's wants, needs, and experience to create the perfect mix of functionality.
• Google certainly wasn't the only search engine on the Internet. It did however do what Yahoo, Bing, and AskJeeves failed to do; with their homepage's singular focus, they made it incredibly easy for a user to quickly and easily find the most relevant information.

Google, Facebook, and Apple make it clear that if you want to succeed in the 21st century, technical prowess isn't everything, you need to cater to the user experience.

Other success stories include: Amazon (during the company's first year Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into achieving a positive customer experience than advertising), and Joe Gebbia from AirBnB credits UX design as the reason the company quickly reached a $10 Billion valuation.

In short, the quality of user experience design has a direct correlation to a company's ability to succeed.

How Do I Achieve The Benefits Of User Experience Design?

A professional UX consultant will work with you to understand what drives your audience and how to create an effective technology solution to satisfy them. This can take the form of an existing website audit or going through a design process as part of the creation of a new site. Overall it's about focusing on the user and what they need .

Usability testing is one tool that we frequently see having an enormous impact on the effectiveness of an app or website. By observing how customers interact with your website pages, any problem areas are quickly identified. This commonly means improved conversions and a more positive experience for the customer.

User experience design targets you and your team's efforts on what works for your users. This can save a developer from working on a feature that nobody wants to use or a marketer from crafting messaging that doesn't make sense to your audience. By investing the time to research what users actually want with testing, web traffic analysis and by speaking with users, user experience design saves money.

The Bottom Line

Businesses fail if their customers aren't happy. Make your users happy by creating a refined, tested, and exceptional user experience through a website that effectively caters to users' wants, needs, and expectations.

When your users are happy they are more likely to convert into loyal brand ambassadors who are willing to purchase your services or products on a regular basis.