User Experience 101: Why UX Design Boosts Business

Think about your favorite restaurant. Is it your favorite just because of the food? Or is it that the service, environment, premises, location, and the overall experience play a role?

That is exactly the case in digital products. User experience is what makes a product successful, or a failure. You can have the best functions, architecture, and integrations, but if the experience is not satisfactory, users will not be coming back.

Spotify vs Apple Music is a clear example of this. The former surpassed the latter by more than 40 million more users in 2021. The key? Spotify is focus in user experience.¹

It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives.

– Don Norman, Co-founder of Norman Nielsen Group

What Is UX?

“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.² There are seven factors that impact user experience in all digital products, as described by Peter Morville, a pioneer in the fields of information architecture and user experience.

Useful
Desirable
Accessible
Credible
Findable
Useable
Valuable

In short, UX is perceived satisfaction. It’s what users experiment before, during, and after using the product. It’s what makes any app, website, or platform lower its creation costs and creates a loyal userbase.

Benefits of UX Design, Explained in Numbers

The research conducted by Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D., “Why Software sucks,” tells us that at least 50% of the programmers’ time is wasted in avoidable tasks.

Earlier mistakes are cheap. Identifying and solving mistakes in the planning and design stage is up to five times less expensive than doing it in the developing stage. With a bit of research, prototyping, and usability tests, and a team trained in UX design, any product can offer an effective, efficient, and satisfactory experience to the highest possible amount of users.

“For the 6-year period between 2007–2012, leading companies in UX design outperformed the broader market, with an average performance three times higher than the S&P 500 index”.

– Watermark Consulting 2013 Customer Experience ROI Study

Be it in websites, apps, desktop tools, or IoT (Internet of Things), implementing UX design tools guarantees a pleasant experience that will make you stand out from the competition. Peter Eckert estimates that every euro invested in UX generates a return on investment of between US$2 to US$100.

If your project is already in full production, or even in the publishing stage, it can still be reiterated and improved upon. UX design changes implemented in the Mozilla support system contributed to a reduction of 70% in support calls⁴. This generates a higher level of efficiency, quality, and savings.

Below, we share a list of recommendations that we consider indispensable for any digital product project.

Knowing the users for whom the product will be developed.
Defining a clearly-focused and validated scope before starting the project.
Respecting the design patterns learned by the users.
Implementing visually attractive styles.
Controlling usability quality via heuristic evaluations.

With a small amount of research (UX research), the right wording (UX writing), and special attention paid to interface design (UI), any idea can become a satisfactory experience for the users.

At 1950labs, we believe in distributed teams for building high-quality & pixel-perfect software. If you have a digital project, and you want it to have the best user experience, get in contact at [email protected] — We work on EST.