The ROI of UX Investments

• What is UX?
  • Importance of UX in Web Design
• ROI of UX Investments
• Why should UX be part of your website efforts?
• How to Take a More UX Focused Approach

What is UX?

UX, short for user experience, encompasses every interaction someone has with your organization. Whether it’s browsing your website, visiting your physical location, viewing an advertisment, or speaking with a company representative, all of those different touch points contribute to the user’s experience.

Importance of UX in Web Design

The discipline of UX design is a user-centered process that takes an evidence-based approach to creating and optimization meaningful experiences. It’s important in web design because it goes beyond simply designing something that looks good, it ensures the needs of users are being fulfilled. Think of it as ergonomics for your website!

ROI of UX Investments

Return On Investment (ROI) is a profitability metric that measures the return on a particular investment relative to the cost of that investment.

When it comes to understanding the ROI of UX investments, calculating profitability can get tricky. The goal is to end up with a monetary figure that determines how successful your efforts were, however the ROI of UX is often more about demonstrating that the user experience has been improved in some way and, had a positive impact on your business goals.

Why should UX be part of your website efforts?

• Understand problems: The process of UX design helps teams gain a better understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve. Thereby reducing the risk of building the wrong thing.
• Increase conversion rates: In a study from Forrester Research, good UX design can raise your website’s conversion rates by as much as 400%.
• Save costs & time: The rule of thumb is spend $1 on research or $10 to change design or $100 to change something in development. Performing UX research and design upfront will reduce product development cycles by 33 to 50%.
• Increase KPI’s: A survey of design projects conducted by Jakob Nielsen, hailed as the “king of usability”, found that the average improvement in key performance indicators (KPI) was 83%. This is older data so this figure has likely declined, however the ROI of UX is so significant (spend 10% to gain 83%) that it can decrease much more and still have very beneficial outcomes.

“The reality is that great UX design can differentiate products, attract customers, and drive superior business results, so there is no inherent contradiction between investing in User Experience and a business focus on creating customers and profits.”

Pabini Gabriel-Petit, UX Matters

How to Take a More UX Focused Approach

You know the importance of a good user experience, but where do you start? How do you identify potential problems or areas for improvement? One of the most useful tools to help answer these questions is a UX audit. The goal of a user experience audit is to uncover pain points and critical gaps in the user journey through research and analysis. Besides highlighting usability issues, an effective UX audit provides businesses with actionalbe recommendations to address those issues and improve the overall user experience.

We’ll be taking an in depth look at UX Audits on the blog so stay tuned!

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About the Author

Renee Pomerleau is an experienced design and UX professional focused on humanizing technology to improve the world around us.

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