What is UX design?
Based on providing great user experiences, UX design helps establish who your user is, what their needs are and delivers a design process that results in an intuitive, yet functional and beautiful product.
What is the main goal of UX design?
The main goal for any UX design brief is to increase leads, conversions, sales and brand loyalty by delivering amazing levels of customer satisfaction.
A UX designer’s process starts by spending time learning about user needs and creating your user journey. Through their research, a designer will develop a unique understanding of what a digital product or website will need to thrive amongst your growing competition.
It’s all about putting the user first – learning about their pain points, behaviours, attitudes, needs and desires.
Having a good base of research means that as they design, your UX team can design something that someone will actually use and pay money for!
How UX design impacts the digital space
Did you know that approximately 252,000 new websites are created every day? That’s 3 new websites every second! The SaaS industry is booming too, with over 30,000 known SaaS companies worldwide in 2022, in an industry worth over £27 Billion.
With this in mind, think of how many of those sites probably have bad UX:
- In 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported that “35% of money is being left on the table because of bad UX experience in eCommerce”.
- In that same report, they noted that a staggering 88% of users would be less likely to return to a website with bad UX (Justin Mifsud, founder, Usability Geek)
- 67% of customers also said that bad UX experience accounted for their churn (Intechnic.com)
Consumers who have a negative experience like these aren’t sharing your website or your apps with people, or worse still they are sharing negative opinions about them.
On the plus side according to a Forrester report, great UX delivers
- 9900% increase in ROI (wow)
- 400% increase in conversion
- And a profit increase rate of 5:1 when you increase your retention rates
As we know people love to share products and services they really like and find useful. Give them a great experience and they’ll sing your praises from the rooftops!
Our 5 biggest tips for better UX design
1. Design, test, tweak and test again
At Strafe, we work in an agile approach, which means we create our design in reiterative steps; designing, testing and tweaking as we go. This delivers UX design much more effectively across your product or website, capitalising on gains to increase conversions and decrease churn rates.
Just like software developers we take this same approach when it comes to adding new features to websites or apps, meaning you are much more likely to get the desired uptake rates you were hoping for.
2. Open up all avenues to user discovery
If knowing your user is the centre of UX design then you must open all avenues to gain user access. This means exploring focus groups, user interviews, customer service feedback and more.
The more useful data you can gather the stronger your objection hunting, profile building and user mapping will become. As a result, you can go on to establish a much stronger user flow.
3. Build a strong user flow to execute a well-balanced wireframe
We like to start with a user flow before we launch into a wireframe. Essentially, this is a simplified look at how the user will navigate your website or SaaS product.
If you have done your research then you’ll find this process fairly easy, because you’ll know exactly what order of content you need to deliver to keep your users engaged during their experience with you.
This is the foundation of the entire finished product and it has to communicate, engage and nurture your audience. It’s critical that you get it right, so test it, pick it apart and remember to personalise it.
A strong user flow means you don’t waste a penny in the wireframing process.
4. Don’t reinvent the wheel, keep it simple and effective
As designers, it’s our job to bring innovation to the UX design industry, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of providing knock-out experiences. So, if your design doesn’t call for it, don’t faff over that ingenious new idea, instead deliver on usability and better interaction.
5. Give your user a reason to convert
Your user is much more likely to take the next step on your website or your SaaS product if they intuitively feel it’s the ‘right’ next step. But this means knowing what the right step is and making sure you validate a user’s gut feeling right there on the page.
Your research should tell you where to put the value in your content and where to add the ask. Get this right and you are much more likely to get a conversion.
Final thoughts: Why UX design matters
In my mind UX design matters because it is the key foundation of every successful website and app out there. It is the one piece of the puzzle that tells you who your customer is and how to serve them what they’ll pay for.
To ignore the consumer in the design and development process, in today’s market, is essentially business suicide. History is littered with websites that don’t get enough customers and SaaS products whose huge churn rates prevent them from ever getting off the ground.
If I can impart one piece of advice in any of what we have discussed today, it would be this – the guide to making an impact is to remember it’s not about you, it’s about your unique user!
Struggling to get website conversions, or battling a rising churn rate with your app? Drop your project details below and let us take care of your UX problem.
