The Positive ROI of Great UX
Designing a digital experience that fits your customer’s expectations and simultaneously meets business goals involves effort and investment.
But is it really worth it?
It most definitely is. Let us show you why.
User experience (UX) design has a proven history of showing a positive return on investment (ROI). Good UX is often the difference between successful and unsuccessful products. As consumers from all over the world as well as here in the Arab world become more tech-savvy, they’ve developed a higher expectation of usability, design, and service from the applications they use every day.
World-class companies like Google and Facebook continue to invest heavily in UX to optimize their website user experience. Companies that haven’t yet realized the importance of user experience are being surpassed by their competition who sell well-designed and user-friendly products.
The Impact of Investing in UX Design
Research has shown that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention, and increased market share. Research-based estimates suggest that every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return. That’s an ROI of an impressive 9,900 percent. And that’s just the beginning!
Increased Sales and Revenue
User experience has an impact, not just on tangible metrics like cost and time, but also on user satisfaction and happiness. When a product delivers a good user experience, customers are more likely to buy it. Companies like Apple and Amazon have built their reputations on their design quality and easy-to-use interfaces, which is a big part of what has driven their ongoing success.
Companies that sell products with a poor user experience can make profits initially, but it won’t last long. Once users start to realize that the product isn’t meeting their expectations, sales will quickly decline and eventually stop altogether. Dissatisfied customers, poor ratings and reviews, and negative word-of-mouth are very strong in steering other customers away from your company.
Remember, users make an impression of your product within the first few seconds of using it, and if they don’t understand or like it, they won’t hesitate to go elsewhere. So it really is important that you get the UX right from the word go.
Still don’t believe us that UX matters for your business? Let’s look at some more numbers.
In e-commerce websites, millions of customers abandon goods at the checkout due to poor user experience. The figures are quite staggering. The e-commerce industry could have saved $1.42 trillion just by implementing better checkout flow and design which would result in a 25% improvement in conversion rates.
Small UX design fixes could have saved the industry billions of dollars!
Reduced Development Cost and Time
Implementing a user-centered approach throughout design and development will save money, time and effort for rework. Usability testing at an early stage identifies elements of your design that cause errors. These errors would be otherwise overlooked if not tested with real users and result in expensive development rework later in the project.
User research early in the project lifecycle also reveals which features are most valuable to users, helping you to save the development team from building features that aren’t needed.
Nearly 15 percent of IT projects are abandoned because they do not meet their original purpose, and on average, developers spend nearly half of the time on a project reworking issues that were avoidable.
The cost of fixing an error after development is 100 times that of fixing it before development. Research company, Forrester, estimates that for every $1 to fix a problem during design, it would cost $5 to fix the same problem during development, and would cost $30 to fix the same problem after the product’s release.
By fixing usability problems during the development stage of their website, American Airlines reduced the cost of those fixes by 60-90%.
When building a product, focusing on the user experience and implementing a user-centered design process, will help ensure that you can avoid making drastic changes down the line.
Decreased Need for Training Users
Many companies spend a large amount of money on training employees on how to use their software. Why? Because the systems are so complicated that they’re impossible to use without training. That’s a cost that can be avoided.
Although software used by companies can be more complicated than consumer websites and may require some training, the easier the software is to use, the quicker employees will learn. A mid- to large size electric utilities company reported cost savings of $300,000 to $3 million by reducing customer service staff training when they made their customer information system software more usable.
Companies often make the mistake of underestimating the value of UX design when it comes to software to be used by employees. It’s assumed that it’s easier to make employees attend training to learn how to work around the problems. But organizing training events and paying for them involves much greater costs and isn’t always effective.
It’s always better to design the right solution in the first place and to fix usability problems instead of training people to work around them.
Reduced Support Costs
Support costs increase when products have a poor UX design because more users need help. This requires more support staff to reply to phone calls and emails. A recent cost estimate suggests that it costs about $1 per minute for the average call center to service a customer. Let’s do the math. If 1000 people call tech support for 10 minutes each, that’s $10,000!
One example of reduced support calls is when MacAfee made usability fixes to its ProtectionPilot software. There was a 90% decrease in tech support calls after the launch.
Avoid the issues in the first place, so you won’t need the training, staff, and equipment to maintain the support center.
Increased Productivity
Help your customers do what they want to do as quick as possible and as easy as possible.
When consumers are more productive with your products, it leads to increased satisfaction and sales. The UX process inherently results in products being built that help users complete their tasks more easily, efficiently, and with fewer errors. This is because you’ll start making design decisions based on the actual behavior of your customers, not just assumptions you make about them.
Increased User Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty
Customers are more likely to be satisfied, remain loyal to and engage with a brand if the product offers a good user experience. Over 75% of consumers said they were likely to continue spending money as a result of an exceptional customer experience, while 82% would stop spending money with a company as a result of a bad customer experience.
When United Airlines conducted user research to understand what would satisfy their buyers, they increased online ticketing by 200%.
Forrester Research found that a positive customer experience increases customers’ willingness to pay by 14.4 percent, increases their likelihood to recommend a product by 16.6 percent and reduces their likeliness to switch brands by 15.8 percent.
Conclusion
With the growing number of products offering a good user experience, consumers have come to expect a good user experience as the norm. It’s become a top priority to deliver a good user experience to your customers in order to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. Companies that don’t provide a positive experience to their customers will be at a competitive disadvantage to the many companies that do.
Involving users in the design process and testing the design with them is the key to an user experience that sets you apart from competition. When products are easy to use and satisfying for users, it increases revenue, reduces costs and is just good for business all round.
At UXBERT Labs we specialize in UX Research, Design & Development services that deliver world-class experiences. With offices in Riyadh and Dubai, our team of UX Researchers, Designers, and Developers deliver custom designed and built software to help businesses succeed.
Looking for a UX agency in Dubai or Saudi? Email us at hello@uxbert.com and let us show you why we’re an award winning company.
