As businesses start to adopt user experience techniques and practices more, there is less misunderstanding about the process and why it’s so valuable. But there will always be those stakeholders who think it’s a waste of money and that marketing budgets should be spent elsewhere. There are many ways to validate its value and importance in the scope of improving systems for use by users and potential customers. White papers and statistical data can prove its worth, but why not go one better and offer a comprehensive view of what user experience is and why it matters.
Explaining User Experience In Layman’s Terms
Taking it back to the beginning can sometimes be your best course of action to get buy-in from someone who doesn’t see the benefit in UX. Start by explaining that user experience is a way to streamline every person’s interaction with a product or service and then demonstrate it to them in terms of regular examples that will help them relate to your field of vision. A classic real-world example of where user experience has been ignored is where a path to a doorway has been built so that it winds around trees or garden beds, instead of taking the most direct route. The winding path has no real purpose except to make users take longer to get to their destination and results in users skipping the path altogether and rather treading their own path across the grass.
The moral of the story is that user experience is direct, it’s clean, it’s simple and it helps users get where they need to go quicker and more effectively. Real-world examples are a mirror for online examples and are no more important. Both have equal measure when it comes to improving the user journey and overall experience.
Selling User Experience To Business Executives
When it comes to the decision makers in the business, they will be interested in how user experience can create a positive impact on the company’s bottom line. If you can prove to them that user experience will have a return on investment, it will be a lot easier to get it passed for implementation and a slice of the marketing budget.
By implementing user experience at the beginning of the customer journey (and also during planning phases for the build of a product or web property), you can experience a host of benefits that carry through for the long run:
- An increase in sales and revenue due to the simple, effective approach from a UX perspective
- Decrease in training and support because the system works
- A decrease in development costs
- A decrease in the need for changes made to web properties, products or systems because they’ve been designed in a way that works from the get go
- Increase in customer satisfaction and by extension, customer retention too
At the end of the day, everything you do should be about your customers and your users. If you’re not building systems for them, who are they for? Your users are the people you are trying to impress so it becomes about so much more than revenue.
Making the user experience the hero can be a little easier if there are real and relevant challenges within the user journey. Showing how user experience can streamline and do away with these challenges is one of the best ways to showcase the full benefit. Addressing these issues can only have a compound effect because once the users are satisfied, it will show in their appreciation for the brand, which can also be translated as revenue.
Breaking down the elements of user experience into smaller bites might help make it more digestible as a whole. The multiple layers that make the user experience a complete practice and methodology are each as important as the whole.
Are you trying to find a way to get user experience to become a part of your business? Chat to us today and we will help you implement it effectively.