With my 15+ years of experience as a UX and CRO practitioner, I have been asked questions about “Why do we need UX design?” and “How does UX contribute to our business?”
UX design has been conventionally thought of as a practice to make your website look beautiful and a nice-to-have for only large businesses. This is incorrect. UX design is an essential component of all online businesses success, the question is whether you have good or bad UX?
To answer this question, you need to ask yourself — can our customers fulfil a task or goal on our website? for example, finding the product they want and purchase it easily. If not, you are currently losing these customers to your competition and the revenue they bring to your business.
Here, I will cover three key points on how UX optimisation can effectively grow your business:
#1 Identify UX quick wins to improve ROI
When you optimise your online user experience, users are more satisfied with their experience of buying your product or service. This builds a positive association with your brand, particularly if you have made the experience easy and enjoyable, users will be happy to return to your site to purchase again.
To start optimising your user’s experience in a low cost and effective way, consider the following first steps:
- Identify your user’s biggest pain points and align these with their needs and goals
- Select low implementation effort and high impact optimisations
- Start with AB testing industry best practices, learn and continue to optimise
#2 Optimize ROAS (return on ad spend) and your landing pages
Traditionally, I have seen that businesses increase their ad spend if they don’t see enough users converting online. The challenge here is it’s often the ads that are optimised and not the website or app itself. It’s important to remember that users engage in one brand experience which could include ads, a website and up to a phone call from your business. All of these elements need to make sense together to create a frictionless user journey.
Key tip: When you’re reviewing your ads, ensure you are also optimising your website or landing pages that are relevant to those ads to maximise your return on ad spend.
#3 Understand your users needs and optimise
As the name describes, UX is the user’s experience of your business. It is important to make time to understand your users needs and test and learn what aligns best with your business goals.
Researching users’ needs and wants can take many forms, get started by looking into what you have already at your disposal. Start with quantitative research in your analytics platform, review the User and Checkout flow funnels and identify key pain points. Additionally, organise user interviews, focus groups or usability testing to get further insight.
With these learnings, you will start to understand what are your UX priority optimisations for your website or app. Remember this is a continuous process, users needs and expectations change over time. Key moments to carry out this research is prior to launching a new product or feature or before launching a redesign.
A great example of these steps being implemented is in the case study of Essilor Luxottica, the world’s largest eyewear company. The Think with Google case study explains how they generated more revenue by improving their user experience.
User experience key takeaways
- Start out small. Don’t jump into making huge changes or adding lots of new features. Sometimes it’s the details that matter.
- Not one and done. Making changes to UX should be a continuous process. Let your users and the data inform your next move.
- Test, test, test. Conducting A/B testing is a great way to learn what works well for your users. This lets you make data-informed changes to improve UX.
Optimising your UX is a cost-efficient, scalable, proven method of improving your conversion rate, revenue and return on ad spend metrics.
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