When we think about innovative brands, in most cases, there is one that automatically pops into our mind: Apple. The technology company was one of the first to go against the status quo by building innovative, simple, and useful products that changed the world. Apple characterizes for its elegant products focused on a minimalistic design. However, is the design the only reason for their success? No. The user experience is.
In today's world, people not only care about how a product looks, but they also prioritize the experience. Applications and websites are the perfect examples of this. You could have the most simple and trendy website, but if users can't understand how to use it, it's all in vain. Chances are they visit a different, more responsive website, that offers a similar product/service to yours.
This is when a user experience expert makes the difference, focusing on giving users the best experience possible while using your product. User Experience Experts may utilize end-to-end testing to ensure their offering is seamless, giving users the best experience possible. In return, this has great benefits for your business, which we will later analyze in this article.
The Role of a User Experience Expert
User experience (UX) has many different definitions that revolve around the same thing: how the user feels about a product or service. It involves all the person's emotions and perceptions when using your product, system, or service design.
A user experience expert's role consists of understanding how users feel and interact with a product/service and make this experience as easy and enjoyable as possible. Their final goal is to provide the user with an intuitive, efficient, and relevant experience.
Among the main tasks and responsibilities of a user experience expert, you’ll find:
- Plan and conduct user research competitor analysis
- Determine information architecture and create sitemaps
- Create prototypes and wireframes
- Run user testing of application, software, and websites
- Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications
- Make strategic design and UX decisions related to core and new functions and features.
A lot of people confuse the roles of UX designer vs. UI developer because of the similarities. These two roles go hand in hand in determining how a product will look (UI) and function (UX). One can't succeed without the other one.
However, they have a few key differences. The main aspect where both roles differ is that UI developers focus on how a product looks. More details on the difference between a UI and Ux developer in this article. For example:
As Elon Musk said ‘’Any product that needs a manual is broken.’’ UX works under this premise focusing on providing users with the best experience using a product. User experience experts focus on how a product makes you feel. If its enjoyable to use and you can easily understand all its features instead of looking for a tutorial, then you know your website/app will succeed.
Here’s a simple example of the importance of UX:
5 Benefits of Having a UX Expert in Your Company
Having a UX expert in your business will not only help you understand more about your user’s needs, but it also will highly impact how they engage with your website/application. Keep in mind that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience. And 39% will stop engaging with a website if the images won’t load or take too long.
Let’s evaluate the main benefits of having a user experience expert in your company:
1. Attract Potential Customers
There are millions of websites and applications offering the same product or service as yours. Unless you have an innovative billionaire idea, chances are you’ll have to compete and focus your strategies on differentiating from the other brands. And an effective UX design will help you increase the conversions on your websites.
Offering new users a great experience, optimized usability, and accessibility will automatically increase their satisfaction. According to Forrester Research, a good UX design could increase conversion rates up to 400%.
2. Boost Your SEO Strategy
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is what makes your business website appear on top of Google search results. A few years ago, SEO wasn't as complicated as it is nowadays. It was mainly about stuffing articles with the right keywords. Nowadays, Google considers many factors besides keywords. For example, appearing in the first results also depends on your website's security, speed, if it's mobile-friendly, if it has quality content, in its digital storytelling strategies, among other things.
When you work with a UX specialist, having a stronger SEO strategy is easier because both SEO and UX have the common goal of attracting more people to the target website and deliver the kind of content and experience users are looking for. Elements such as headings, easy navigation and site structure, site speed are all elements that your UX expert will take care of and highly impact your SEO strategy.
3. Develop Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty, briefly defined, refers to an emotional relationship between you and your customers that it expresses in customers engaging and constantly purchasing with your product/service. And it’s something that needs to be prioritized since the early beginnings of early companies, as it will help you build credibility and reputation.
As UX centers on understanding users’ needs to give them the best experience while using a website or application, it helps you provide them with better service. A good UX design will streamline and optimize processes to reduce time as much as possible. For example, operations such as checkout, finding items in your app, contact with customer support can be facilitated to make customers happy and trust your brand even more. All this translates into creating long-term relationships with your customers.
4. Be More Competitive
What makes companies stand out? There isn't just one right answer, but one thing is clear. You could have the best idea and product, but you'll lose customers in a heartbeat if you don't offer a great experience. Having a user experience expert will help you evaluate your customer needs to provide the best features and characteristics of an app/website to engage users.
Just think about it this way, if your website loads fast, is easy to use and understand, has valuable features for your customers, you have higher chances of converting users into customers than those websites that take forever to load. UX will help you optimize your product, whether we're talking about a website or an application, in a way that will enable users to enjoy using it.
5. Have a Better ROI
Another significant benefit of having a user experience expert in your company is that you’ll improve your return on investment. A study conducted by Forrester called ‘’The Six Steps for Justifying Better UX’’ claimed that every dollar spent on UX design returns $100.
As users engage, use, and purchase products/services of well-optimized platforms, having a UX designer will help you improve your ROI. The perfect example of this is Bank of America. The bank identified and funded a UX redesign project to enhance its online enrollment application for online banking. The results? The yield metric nearly doubled and exceeded the desired ROI benchmark. The bank saw a 45% increase in online banking registrations.
Final Thoughts
Creating successful websites and applications goes beyond the initial idea. Having solid UI and UX will help your users have the best experience, and in return, provide you multiple benefits. User experience experts can help your company attract users, improve your SEO strategy, develop customer loyalty, improve your ROI, and stay competitive in the market, among other things.
If you want to take your website or application to another level, then consider hiring a UX designer!
Author’s Bio: Gabriela Molina is the writer and executive editor of Distant Job, an agency that helps companies worldwide hire experienced software engineers remotely. As a former freelance journalist, she has covered a wide range of topics throughout her career. She was featured in Datasciencentral, Simpleprogrammer, to name a few. She is currently specializing in the areas of technology, leadership, and remote work.
