There’s good news for people looking for concrete proof that UX is good for business. According to Forrester Research and various industry studies, every dollar invested in UX brings in $2 to $100 return. That’s a pretty great ROI, if you ask us.
So how does better UX translate into tangible business benefits?
1) It boosts sales
If you build something that’s easy to use, people are going to want to use it. If you make your sales process user friendly, people are going to want to buy things. And if you make it easier for users to buy more things, they’re going to do just that. It’s a no brainer, right?
Amazon is a great example of this idea in practice. When Amazon rolled out a UX overhaul and added a product recommendation feature to their customer journey (based on a UX study), they reaped many rewards. They not only enhanced their user experience by streamlining their product search,
they also saw their sales jump by 29% (to $12.38 billion).
Some analysts also estimate that the feature
increased Amazon’s conversion rate by almost 60%. Which brings us to our next point…
2) It leads to higher conversion rates
Getting users to do what you want them to do can be difficult – and it’s even more difficult with bad UX. But using UX principles to understand your users and what motivates them, and to make changes to the user experience that help facilitate the behavior you want, will increase your conversion rates significantly – which boosts your business’s bottom line.
3) It keeps customers around
Once you’ve got your customers and users in the door, your next task is to keep them around and build your relationship. Good user experiences are one good way of doing that.
Customers who have a great user experience are more likely to stay with your brand and your products.
Forrester research backs this up: they found that focusing on user experience not only increases customer willingness to pay for a product by 15.8% – it also increases their brand loyalty by 15.8% and their tendency to recommend your product by 16.6%.
4) It differentiates your brand and gives you a competitive advantage
User experience is becoming one of the most important brand differentiators out there – maybe even more important than price, as users start to have more options and expect more from their products.
Think of companies like Google and Apple. Google wasn’t the only search engine out there and it wasn’t the first. Apple didn’t create the first or only smartphone or portable music player. But both companies did those things
better than anyone else. They perfected the user experience and carved out their dominant place in the market.
The internet is a saturated place, and chances are there are already competitors out there doing what you do. UX is one clear way to do it better, differentiate yourself in your market, and beat out your competitors.
5) It will save you money and resources in the long run
Bad UX design eventually leads to developers being bogged down dealing with problems.
As much as 50% of developer time is spent doing rework that could have been avoided in the first place. This means that it is
much more expensive and resource-draining to fix a problem later on than to do so upfront.
Technical bugs can be detrimental to a site, but UX issues are just as problematic. Confusing navigation, badly designed features that no one can use, and wrong assumptions about user behaviour are errors that are expensive and time consuming to fix.
Conducting UX research and testing from the outset can save your development team from reworking problems down the road, and help you get things right the first time.
Key Takeaway
It can be easy to brush UX off as an unnecessary expense, but good UX is essential for keeping your customers happy, driving conversions, and overall boosting your business’s bottom line.
