Why is UX so important to businesses?

User experience (UX) is crucial to any business’s success. If you sell to living, breathing humans, you need to be concerned about the user experience of your website.

Why is user experience (UX) important in ecommerce? What are the benefits?

World-class user experience breeds customer satisfaction.
Better user experience separates the wheat from the chaff.
UX research: Measure twice, cut once.
Improving your business ROI with UX design.

“Focus on the user, and all else will follow.” - Rule #1, Google’s “Ten Things” Philosophy

It’s great to know that it’s essential, but why is it important?

A few benefits of UX design for ecommerce

Customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
Setting yourself apart from the competition.
Saving on development time and costs.
Return on investment.

Customers visiting your site are usually there for a specific reason, and you only have a few moments to capture their attention and get them started on the path to their desired goal (buying those awesome running shoes, for example). A UX-optimized site has a far better chance of doing this through an evolving understanding of customer behaviours and user interface/interaction best practices. Gaining this knowledge happens through user research, testing, and iterative improvements.

World-class user experience breeds customer satisfaction.

Happy customers are returning customers. Period.

Customer satisfaction is a huge indicator of a business’s potential success. User experience directly affects the customer’s experience with the company. Consumers will go elsewhere if a company has a great product but low customer satisfaction rates because of other items like poor website functionality or slow customer service response.

How many surveys do you receive to rate products or services you purchased? There is a good reason for all those review requests. Research shows that companies can expect impressive returns on a 3-year investment. This investment includes research, user experience and user interface changes, and iterative testing and improvements, just to name a few.

The same study also shows that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. The information provided in customer review surveys can be enormously helpful in the quest to improve user experience — obtaining actual user feedback is the key.

A good user experience will foster that all-important trust, which helps keep customers on your site and ultimately buying your products or services. Online customers are fickle — it doesn’t take much to put them off and, since there may be so many companies online selling similar products or services, it won’t take long for them to abandon your site in favour of another.

One example of this might be providing returning customers with an option to buy with one click, with all their shipping, billing and payment info already saved. If you have ever shopped on Amazon, you may be familiar with this helpful feature.

Creating happy customers with UX optimization segues nicely into the next section, setting your company apart from the competition.

Better user experience separates the wheat from the chaff.

Happy customers can become fans. Fans can become evangelists. Soon your company stands out from the crowd through powerful referrals and word of mouth.

These are just some of the benefits of good UX.

In a very competitive online marketplace, you need every advantage to set yourself apart from the competition. In any business — even in a market with solid competitors — good UX and understanding your customers' behaviours, pains and goals will push you ahead.

Let’s look at Airbnb. They were never the only short-term rental market out there, but they separated themselves from the rest by improving trust, one of the gaps competitors failed to address correctly at that time. Airbnb did this in several different ways: Implementing verified photos, increasing security to prevent fraud and adding the ability to have customer reviews.

UX research: Measure twice, cut once.

In his book “Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach,” Roger Pressman stated that fixing issues during design costs $1 versus $10 in development. I would further say that user research and testing will help avoid many problems early on before they become a burdensome task in the development phase.

Having UX research and early testing with rapid prototypes will help identify problems early with interactions and flows. Knowing that testers are having issues with a checkout process or particular feature can help identify where the problem lies and all this without a line of code. Equally important is getting that site live and testing and iterating to improve the experience continuously.

Improving your business ROI with UX design.

Well, it’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it? Why would your company spend money on something as seemingly intangible as UX?

Simple. A study by Forrester (The Six Steps For Justifying Better UX - Forrester 2016) suggests that for every $1 invested in UX, the return in revenue can be as high as $100. That’s a 1000% increase. Even if it was only a 100% increase, wouldn’t it still be worth it?

This return comes from various sources, like lowered development costs, decreased cart abandonment and reducing the number of times people leave your site out of sheer frustration.

Conclusion

Businesses should never underestimate the value of good UX. Positive user experiences have proved to be excellent for ROI, and establishing lasting relationships with your customers will only help improve your profits and new customer acquisition.