10 UX essentials to build a successful business
User Experience helps you define a sound strategy, boost growth and retain customers.
As a freelance UX (User Experience) designer and strategist, I work with a variety of organizations and businesses. It has never ceased to amaze me how large the gap is between those who “get it” and those who simply do not. So, I decided to compile a list of 10 essentials I wish all companies understood.
1. UX should be the foundation of your corporate strategy
All businesses exist and thrive on the sole premise that they provide a solution to a problem. Being able to provide solutions to customers problems means understanding exactly what their needs are. As needs change, so must a business’s solutions or they provide no value. To quote Alex Osterwalder’s book: Value Proposition Design, “Your customers are the judge, jury, and executioner of your value proposition. They are merciless if you don’t find a fit!”. Many businesses have moved to the use of techniques such as user interviews, customer journeys, rapid prototyping, and service blueprints to better understand the needs of their customers and create a corporate strategy to supply solutions. Adapt or be disrupted.
2. Invest in UX to boost conversion and sales
As the customer journey has become increasingly complex, so has the sheer number of touchpoints. Companies need to map all of their customer’s touchpoints and track their performance. Learning which ones underperform, which excel, and where improvements can be made is imperative in creating an omnichannel strategy.
Clients will often ask me to simply “fix” a user interface, not understanding that it’s the user-journey that is broke. “End-of-pipe” solutions never work without tracking every piece of data and every user interaction along the way.
Don’t forget to maximize customer acquisition as well by considering those who suffer from disabilities. According to the World Health Organization, around 15% of the world’s population have some sort of cognitive, sensory, or physical disability that may prevent them from being able to use your services. Most companies don’t focus on accessibility and leave a large portion of potential consumers untapped.
3. UX determines how your brand is perceived
The success and failure of any business’s image relies heavily on its public perception. User expectations have increased dramatically in recent years and any kind of frustration caused by poor user support, complicated interfaces, or lack-of-communication, damages a business’s reputation. Modern users not only have high expectations but are impatient. With a frictionless user-experience being the current “norm”, any sort of hiccup or speedbump can mean losing a client and possibly, bad press. Even the best products in the world can be deemed inferior due to a bumpy user-journey.
4. Quantitative and qualitative analysis go hand in hand
Figuring out user behavior is discovered through both qualitative and quantitative research. In my experience, most companies will either invest heavily in gathering aggregated data or organize qualitative user sessions, but rarely both. Understanding how users think comes from both the actions they make and understanding why they make them. This is why detailed user-testing is so vital in creating a superb user-experience.
The biggest tip I can give in this department is to invest in a UX database that centralizes all user-research, prototype feedback, and customer support data. Far too often I see companies with ample data that is scattered, making it hard to analyze.
5. UX cultivates user-centricity
This may sound obvious at this point in the article, but your company as a whole should be looking at things from the perspective of the user. The not-so-obvious part is that this means every employee. From the back-end programmers to the front-of-house customer support agents and sales representatives, every employee should feel directly responsible for a great user experience. Successful companies are built off of amazing work-culture, and yours should be one centered around creating a flawless user experience. Collect customer feedback from all departments and tell your customers exactly how their feedback makes a difference. Show them that you really care.
6. UX professionals thrive in a multidisciplinary team
When hiring a UX professional or freelancer, know that their role may change depending on the structure of the company. When joining a team, a UX professional will likely be working alongside a Project Manager, Visual Designer, Software Engineer, Marketer, Business Analyst, Motion Designer, Copywriter, QA Engineer… the list goes on. All too often clients will hire a UX professional and direct them to: “take care of all the design-related stuff”. UX professionals can wear many different hats but they need specific direction. An established work-culture with a clear vision is important to ensure all parties can work together effectively. When hiring a UX professional it is important to consider personality, experience, and to create a healthy environment for them to work in. One where ideas flow freely without the worry of stepping on anyone’s toes or encountering scrutiny.
7. UX is a design subset not the whole pie
When it comes to digital products there are a wide array of terminologies to describe different jobs. Roles will often overlap but throughout my personal working experience, I’ve organized them into four main groups:
- Analysts discover users’ needs by analyzing behaviors and translating those insights into actionable data. In this category, there are Business Analysts, Functional Analysts, UX Researchers, and Strategists.
- Ideators focus on creating prototypes for user-testing to verify hypotheses and turn actionable data into solid strategies. Here we have Interaction Designers, Service Designers, and Information Architects.
- Builders collect the initial raw data, research analysis, and actionable ideas to create the vessel that delivers a flawless solution. In this category, we find the User Interface Designers, Visual Designers, Motion Designers, and Front-end Developers.
- Lastly, we have Managers. These individuals oversee the creation of the final product by overseeing the entire design process. They make sure nothing is missed, overlooked, and that the end product is spectacular. These roles include Product Designers, UX Designers, and Product Owners.
While this is not the end-all-be-all of design terminology it outlines a good idea of the broad spectrum of work that goes into digital products. Every company is different and there is always overlap but the main goal is always the same — to design experiences users love.
8. Interpreting user-data requires knowledge of human behavior
User-data begins and ends with humans. Because of this, core knowledge of psychology, anthropology, and economics are imperative in interpreting user-data. Design techniques such as progressive disclosure help to retain user-focus and increase user’s attention. Incentivizing users to make certain decisions, loss aversion, conformity, etc. all encourage users to act a certain way. These tactics can be used to sway human behavior positively but can also result in dark patterns. Never mislead customers only to boost your numbers in the short term.
As we are humans ourselves, when analyzing data, it is crucial to isolate what is actionable and what is not. Data is not hard to come by but it’s easy to fall into confirmation bias. Clickmaps, scrollmaps, heatmaps, analytics, and keyword research are amazing tools to use but useless if you aren’t being honest about what the data means. My advice is for companies to focus heavily on A/B testing to avoid letting ego muddy clear, objective results. This benefits not only users but companies, and ultimately profitability as well.
9. You can’t improve what you don’t measure
Any idea can be spun to sound great, especially when coming from a confident individual. But changes need to be made off of the basis of data and not a gut decision. As I have stated throughout this entire article, everything needs to be tracked, measured, and analyzed. Only then can you give users what they really need.
10. UX helps you fail fast and often
Many companies do some initial user research and then spend months focusing their attention elsewhere. More worried about meeting launch deadlines or boosting their social presence, they lose track of what the consumer is looking for. A truly spectacular user experience is achieved through constant testing with users, analyzing data, strategizing, and constantly making improvements. Egos need to be checked at the door and funds put back into the company. Use that money to hire experts and allow them to contribute their skills fully. It is one of the best investments a company can make.
I’m Wout Helsmoortel, a freelance UX Designer and strategist based in Ghent, Belgium — www.wouthelsmoortel.com
