It’s a huge value, you know that, right? If a business would place more emphasis on their customers’ instead of themselves they will see better results for both their customers and their business.
In one well-known example, The $300 Million Button, UIE’s Jared Spool made one simple change and the rise in revenue was enormous. He writes:
When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.
Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.
The benefits of user experience design (UX) are being seen by countless businesses. Yet, for every company that understands the benefits of UX, there are others – thousands – that don’t. These businesses often choose to do things the easy way or the cheap way instead of spending a little bit more time or a little bit more money to do it the right way.
User experience design is disruptive; disruptive to internal processes and beliefs as well as to the competition. It puts your customers’ needs before your own. It requires you to care more about the downstream effect than what is happening now. It requires you to ask tough questions. It requires you to challenge the status-quo. This is not how most businesses operate and the change is scary to most people.
Businesses that do not see the benefits of UX design are often focused on themselves, their products or what their competitors are doing. They aren’t accustomed to thinking from their customers’ point of view. They’re struggling.
UX design emphasizes putting people first, people like your customers. It also creates products that are usable, useful and enjoyable. UX design will help you craft an experience that meets your business goals and makes your customers happy. Some businesses fully appreciate this.
The fundamentals of user experience design carry huge amounts of value. However, the challenge is in getting businesses to change their way of thinking, to focus on making their customers happy and to trust the team of designers doing the work. Care about your customers, challenge the status-quo and create your own $300 Million Button.
