over 5 years ago from Robert Williams, Owner, Folyo
I think a lot of us would agree that non-designers care (or should care) about having great design in their life because it helps make their life easier.
So how do you describe the benefit of great UX design to businesses in a few words? What's the main benefit of having a great UX?
To put it very briefly, without the use of UX design practices, you're designing based on assumptions rather than empirical data.
It is impossible to create experiences for your users without gathering real world information, designing based on gathered information, and testing your hypotheses.
Interesting! So the benefit in investing in UX design is that a business gets to: stop guessing about how to improve the experience a customer has, and therefore makes improving it cheaper because a higher percentage of effort is successful?
When does a business benefit most by caring about this (improving the customer experience)? Is there a calculation a business can make to ensure that UX design project will be profitable?
For one thing, bad UX could mean not being able to pay for a product. I would say that could help become profitable lol
Interesting, how could bad UX mean not being able to pay for the product?
This is the exact assumption I think designers make that seems obvious to them, but would benefit the rest of the world if it were made explicit.
I actually just had this experience with Carbonmade. When trying to find a way to upgrade my account, I was unable to find the interface for upgrading. In this case, poor design lost them 12 dollars a month.
One service provider's site had a dropdown to enter the expiry year of my credit card, which was missing from their options. Any UX designer of any level would have caught this.
Can’t agree. The method you have described is the lean approach or semi-scientific and can be applied in any industry, occupation or even life, not only design.
First of all, let's clarify what UX Design means. note: I hope it is not just an application of the lean, or scientific methods to the production process. Otherwise, anybody who applies methods is UX designer.
Let's go back to Bill Buxton's explanation.
By my words designing user experience means to apply the creative process to bring a solution which improves the user experience of a product.
So what are the particular benefits of UX design? Long story short: improvement of users experience.
If users feel better while using a product, they are more likely to buy or promote a product. If they feel like a shit, it's much harder to convince them to buy and even ask to promote.
I have never sold UX to a company by explaining my methods, nobody cares methods. Rather I am asking: how we can ensure that we as designers are doing a good job. How do we know that our solution is the right one? How do we know that we have improved the product?
You cannot 'don't have' a user experience, no matter if you design it or not. So it's just better to think it through and plan for it.
But I never try to describe 'benefits of UX design', I always dig deeper into what exactly the customer needs. And, sadly, usually what customer needs is for someone to just draw the user interface and do it 'right', whatever that means. Still, it's better done by someone who does it for a living (and who already made most of the possible mistakes) than by someone who faces it for the first time in his life (founder, manager, programmer, etc.).
Another way to think about this is: what is the cost of bad design, or no design, at all? The cost benefits can range greatly. In the digital space, a good user experience can result in lower support call volume, for instance.
Communicating the value of UX can be tricky for some clients, because they are suspicious the designer is just adding bloat to the project to raise fees. They want the final result, but don't understand that UX methods are key to getting there.
For them, I find the best way to teach this is to connect the process to the outcome. Doing user research will help you improve your conversion rate, or user testing will help you find which areas of the app need better onboarding to reduce your churn. Etc.
Other clients don't even care about metrics, as bizarre as that sounds. They're purely just trying to buy a nice design or hire a designer to bring their vision to life. In those cases, UX is a tougher sell but it's still doable if you don't call it UX—I just use these techniques as part of my process without adding extra phases or fees. It's just part of what I do. Avoiding that conversation can help with these kinds of clients.
Awesome!
Is "UX design" something that only applies to software/apps? Or is UX design/thinking something you can apply to any type of product, experience, or service?
UX typically applies to software and apps as most products seems to have some digital aspect to them. UX design really does relate to all types of products or experience as it's short for"User Experience design." Any site/product/service/experience can benefit from the insights gained from research and knowing the userbase.
This is where I start to get confused.
If any type of site/product/service/experience can benefit from the insights gained from researching a user base... how come UX designers mostly focus on apps?
Well, maybe you're just so focused on the industry. Look around everywhere in the world and you'll notice UX design in everything from interior, layouts of homes to businesses like restaurants to increase the flow of customers to call centers that are logistically placed right or the label on the door that tells you to push or pull on a confusing knob/handle. I think it plays onto most things in life.
just say it loud.
"I would prefer a better user experience rather than having an average one"
I'm sure that no company desires an 'average' experience.
I agree, but I’m trying to get away from assuming everyone intrinsically knows the benefits of a great user experience and instead be explicit about what they are.
I get that a good user experience is better than a bad one but it’s pointless unless we can define how and why it’s better with words.
"The experience is the design..." (hold strait face). (say nothing else).
Ux design is a way to discover and address hidden problems in a project before resources are poured into code and design. Finding problems at the code stage is costly and usually reduces your ROI. “Measure twice, cut once”
With UX design, “you can fail fast and cheap!”
Say you have $20k to develop an idea into an app/platform etc. You can hire bunch of developers and have them develop your idea for you.
Half way through it, it becomes clear that what they’re developing is not quite what you had imagined. Not only have you wasted precious time, you’ve also wasted money!
With a UX designer, you can prototype and test your idea in a matter of days if not hours!
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