It is not uncommon for a user-friendly user interface to be seen as a nice-to-have feature rather than a necessity. There is often a lack of understanding among companies that UX design is primarily needed by the business itself.
McKinsey, a global consulting agency, tracked design practices at 300 companies in 3 industries: healthcare, consumer products, and retail banking for 5 years, and found a pattern between design quality and profits.
Companies that excel in design increase revenue and shareholder returns almost twice as fast as their industry peers. Yet still about half of companies don’t understand the value of design and its impact on product and business.
In another study, McKinsey Agency found out how many companies don’t rely on UX design for product design – more than 50% of participants failed to objectively evaluate their design activities, and 40% didn’t collect feedback from users at all.
However, more and more companies are beginning to realize the importance of web design and engineering. They create great user interfaces because they put the user’s interests first and this gives them a definite advantage.
Bonuses for businesses
Here’s what user-centered businesses get:
1. Create a product that is in demand
Companies do not try to impose their vision but are guided by the needs and expectations of the user, which automatically makes the product necessary and useful. This means that their sites will have higher conversion and lower churn rates, and customer loyalty will only grow.
To know about the current trends, study the Top 20 UI/UX Design Trends For 2024.
2. Make informed business decisions
Every company has its own opinion about what customers need. But any hypothesis must be supported by research: user surveys, analytics, and behavioral analysis. This will make it possible to anticipate the desires of users, and thus gain a significant competitive advantage.
So how do you develop a good UX design for a website?
Data-Driven Design
Data-driven design is designing a product based on data: research, testing, hypothesis testing, and big data.
That is, the project is created on the basis of research and tests, not on the basis of guesswork or personal taste. This is a user-centered approach – the needs and convenience of the user come first.
Where do you get this data?
User and customer feedback
This is information that you can get from customers and users directly by interviewing them. User responses show people’s opinions and reactions. This allows you to understand user actions, and improve usability, conversion, and sales.
Options:
- Site surveys.
- Feedback widgets.
- Dedicated feedback pages.
- Email surveys.
- Online surveys on other sites.
- Interviews with users.
Usability testing
This is website usability testing, a way of evaluating functionality by observing real visitors at the moment they use the resource.
This method of analyzing the user interface helps to find obstacles to conversion and sales, as well as to identify technical glitches, incorrect wording that confuses users, design flaws, and bugs.
There are many methods of UX usability testing, ranging from unmoderated methods to usability testing with moderators and participants.
Target audience research
The entire CA consists of segments, i.e. groups of users who have similar socio-demographic characteristics. The main goal is to find and typify these segments. To do this, you need to:
- Gather a list of the top marketers in your niche.
- Analyze slices of their audiences using similarweb.com.
- Conduct stakeholder interviews to understand who their target audience is.
- Identify and describe key segments of the target audience.
This approach allows you to rely not on guesswork and assumptions, but on real data for a particular category.
Behavioral analytics
This is a set of techniques that are used to better understand the state of the marketplace and the expectations of potential customers. These include surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and customer observation.
Stages of research:
- Identifying key segments of CA.
- Observing users as they interact with the site, for example, by recording sessions.
- Conducting informational interviews to learn users’ opinions, motivations, and interaction scenarios. That is, to answer questions about what your users do on the site, how, and why.
- Analyze the resulting data, create user scenarios, and map customer paths.
User behavior analytics will give you insights – ideas on how to improve the user experience. Once the insights are gathered, we do research again – testing product hypotheses.
To summarize
Design is part of the process of exploring and pinpointing requirements to create solutions and products that end users will love.
- Empathizing with the user experience is the first step to improving it.
- The data you collect during user analysis will help you get to know and understand your users better so that you can then improve the quality of your site.
- Design decisions are made based on data, but they need to be validated by testing on users and getting feedback from them.
