The UI and UX design term has become such ubiquitous in app and website design that it can sometimes be difficult to determine what we’re actually talking about when we use them. While UI or User Interface seems straightforward enough – it’s about creating a way for the user to interact with your application –UX or User Experience is a much hazier term. It’s about what your users experience, that much is clear. But what is the point of going for good UX?
Well, let’s start off with a little analogy. The difference between good and bad UX on a site or application is like the difference between good and bad service in a restaurant. The food (i.e., the content and products) might be made by a five-star chef, but if the wait staff drops it on the floor before it ever gets to the customer’s table, that doesn’t matter. Mind you, a patient guest will eventually get their meal and enjoy it, but most others will have left by then. That just leaves you with all that delicious food and nobody to whom to serve it.
So, in essence, UX is your application’s service staff. It’s there to guide your users through your site with as few distractions as possible and get them where they want to go – a conversion. Which is, incidentally, where you want them to go as well.
The benefits of good UX design are many, so let’s just look at a few of them here.
Good UX design gets you business
As online and mobile touchpoints become ever more important to the user/buyer journey in virtually all industries, UX design is increasingly becoming a major differentiator between competitors. While price will always remain a factor in commerce dealings, good UX design is considered a good way to increase acquisitions and conversions, which benefits your bottom line.
More user-friendly design means that your users need to do less work and take less steps in order to be converted. Streamlining and shortening this portion of the buyer journey is crucial, not only to get those conversions, but also to wow your users. By showing that you truly understand what your users want (and what they don’t want) in their online experience, you will stick in their minds. That will also lead to more social sharing and word-of-mouth recommendations.
Good UX design helps you keep your users
Especially in E-Commerce, customer retention is vital. You want your customers to keep coming back again and again for new interactions and new purchases. This isn’t getting any easier with the current proliferation of Commerce sites around the world and across industries. As stated above, UX is increasingly becoming a differentiator, so you need to leverage it to make your app or site stand out from the crowd.
Positive experiences create loyalty, and UX design creates positive experiences. If their interactions with your app or site are pleasant, maybe even entertaining, your users will be back. A client, Transvoice, came to us with that exact purpose in mind: to get a fresh design of the web portal, which now allows interpreters to easily track tasks. The result is a portal that users quickly embraced and are happy to work with.
Good UX design reduces development costs
Having a great design ready when you start development will considerably cut down on your expenses. Such a design is based on studying user behavior and extensive usability testing in the prototyping stage. What this means is that real users get to use a non-functional version of an app or site, a so-called prototype, so designers can test whether it is user-friendly.
Doing these tests ahead of the actual development enables development teams to estimate costs much more precisely and prevent feature creep, the steady addition of new features during the development process. Making sure a design works ahead of the actual implementation also means that fewer re-designs and re-workings will be necessary, further lowering costs. When designing a mobile app, there is also an approach called mobile first design, which includes the practice of developing the best UX/UI on mobile devices first.
Niteco offers professional UI/UX Design Services. Contact us today and find out what good UI/UX design can do for your application
