As a tech business, your product or services rely on the support of your customers. With a lot of competition to compete with, it’s crucial to do everything you can do in order to impress them. Not only that, but there are plenty of potential leads that are likely interested in your business too, so first impressions are key.
User experience – or UX for short – design is an effective way for many businesses to drive sales and boost customer interest. Keeping your customers happy as a company is important, and the right UX design can help with that.
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So what does user experience design entail? In this article, you’ll learn about what makes up UX and how it can benefit your business. There will also be some helpful tips towards the end to implement within your tech business to help it thrive this year.
What is UX Design?
UX design takes an approach toward how the customer interacts and uses the product or service from beginning to end. There are many businesses out there that have already thrust UX design to the top of the priority list when designing their products or services.
Take, for example, PayPal, an online payment system that has made financial transactions online a breeze for many of its users. After designing their website in 2014, their sleek and simplistic design has helped their customers to save time and effort to navigate the site and app. Read more on UI design trends to follow now.
Design, as put by Steve Jobs himself, ‘is not just about what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’
In its most basic of definitions, user experience is the process of supporting the user’s behavior. By doing so, they get the best experience and use possible from the product or service itself, whether it’s improving the product’s usefulness or making it more user-friendly.
User experience design is a part of the development that is critical for your team to get right when creating the product or service. In order to get it right, UX is influenced by analytics and knowing what the ideal customers want to see from the product. This, combined with the team’s existing knowledge, can help build a product or service that will hopefully excel when launched.
How Can User Experience Design Benefit Your Tech Business?
So for your tech business, how can user experience benefit you? There are many advantages to spending more time on UX design in order to enhance your customer’s interactions and overall thoughts on the product or service you’re offering them. Maze’s UX design guide is a great resource for a more in-depth look at user experience in general and well worth a look.
With intentional and strategic user experiences offering the potential to raise conversion rates by as much as 400%, according to True List, it’s definitely worth bringing to your attention.
1. An Increased Amount of Successful Customer Interactions
As a business, it’s important to see a lot of interaction with the product or service that you provide to the existing customers and hopefully many new ones. UX design helps contribute to the number of successful customer interactions. Its purpose is to ensure that the customer’s needs and intentions are met, which ultimately helps your business grow and become more successful in itself.
Whether their intentions are to purchase a product or to find out information, the task is something that needs to be intuitive, and that will delight the customers rather than put them off. By focusing on user experience design, you’ll hopefully see a rise in the number of successful actions taken by customers.
That increased number of interactions will hopefully convert to sales or to actions that are meaningful and beneficial to your business in one way or another.
2. Helps to Reduce Costs
Any new product or design that you’re developing can be a process, and that process can cost you money and resources.
For example, if you have a product that’s moderate in its complexity then you would expect to take anywhere between 3-9 months to get a prototype. This also depends on how big your team is and the budget that’s available to help speed up processes where necessary.
Overall, the timeline for a product or service can be often lengthy, and expenditures can often exceed initial estimations. With UX design, it can help pull focus through the research, analysis, and any testing that you do during this period. It gives your development team the opportunity to make the relevant fixes to the product early on and hopefully without doing too much back and forth.
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With all the design changes done early on and done correctly, it makes for less expensive overall. Using this method for all future product developments can save the business money in the long term.
3. More Satisfied Customers
Satisfied customers are more likely to come back again and again, with very little effort on your part. Brand loyalty has become somewhat of a common trait for customers when it comes to spending money on businesses.
Many of those who are looking at your product or service and comparing them to others on the market will have a level of expectation that needs to be met. User experience helps create a product or service that’s easy enough to use and that overall provides satisfaction that ultimately leads to them making a purchase or completing a task.
The experience itself shouldn’t be something that’s challenging or a chore, so it’s all about crafting an experience that your customers will love. That satisfaction is going to do wonders for your business success, whether it be the word-of-mouth recommendations to provide repeat customer interactions in the future.
4. Gives the Product or Service a Longer Shelf Life
In general, the advancements being made to technology are happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up within the tech industry. It also means that certain products or services might have a limited shelf life in relation to future products and services that come out in a year or five years’ time.
User experience design is all about creating the very best for the customer’s needs and wants. If you’re able to exceed their expectations and then some, UX design could really help to extend the lifespan of the product or service. Despite future products or services coming out, as many brands have done before, what you have created could remain the elite.
As a tech business, your products or services are likely to rely on updates and upgrades to help meet the demands of your customers. User experience design can help make it a lot easier to adapt and change those products or services that need it.
5. Trust and Loyalty
For any business, trust in a brand is important for customers. 59% of shoppers prefer to buy new products when they are shopping with brands that they trust.
Whilst the odd customer might look elsewhere for the first time, it seems that over half of those surveyed above are more inclined to use a brand over and over again when trusted. So with that in mind, if your customers know you provide a good product that meets their needs, then why look elsewhere?
Focusing on user experience can be influential in helping gain your customers’ trust regardless of what you’re offering. By creating an experience they will believe in, it is likely to build up more trust and loyalty overall.
Tips for Implementing UX Design Successfully
Now that you understand the benefits that can come from UX design for your tech business, here are a few tips to implement it successfully for all of your future products and services offered.
1. Know Your Audience
It’s important to know your audience as that’s where a lot of your approach can come from when focusing on UX design. Consider using analytics and any available data on your target audience to understand their behaviors and what they’re after from your product or service. Detail is needed for user experience design, so do your homework on your customers.
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2. Don’t Overcomplicate Things
The last thing you want to do when it comes to your UX design is to overcomplicate it so much that it puts your users off completely. By adding in too much, it’s going to make the functionality and usability of the product or service more difficult to navigate.
Simplicity is what you’re after, so try to be warier of what you’re including when it comes to the features.
3. Remember to Incorporate the User Interface Too
Another integral part of the development process is the user interface or known as UI for short. It’s essential to remember that UI goes hand in hand with UX and, as such, complements one another. Think about how your user interface can be improved alongside any modifications to your UX design.
Most businesses with an online presence can benefit from UX design. As a tech company, you may have future products or services that can benefit from taking a more detailed approach to UX design.
Author Bio:
Freelance writer for many clients across multiple industries. Natalie has two years of copywriting experience. Natalie has a wide range of experience in copywriting web pages for businesses across many industries. She’s also the owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.