UX investments enhance customer experience, and as we all know, happy clients ultimately lead to a higher return. So when you have to decide whether or not to invest in user experience, think about UX and ROI as a continuous feedback loop. The more capital you get in return, the more you can invest in improving your product’s UX, and the more you can improve customer UX, the more return you’ll get and so on… It’s a never-ending story, but a good one! That’s all fine and good but how do we start? How do we grow our ROI through UX and customer experience?
UX and ROI: 5 steps for improving both
Before going over different UX design techniques, let’s dive into the first steps of setting up a UX and ROI strategy.
- The first thing to do is to set your goals. Your business purpose should help to point out where you need to direct your efforts.
- Once you know where you’re going, define the usability metrics for your product. How easy should it be to use? How natural should the learning process be for users? Go over the entire customer journey map. Every interaction with your users should be considered.
- Now it's time for gathering data. But, how? You can perform usability testing with a user target sample, for instance.
- Then you have to do a follow-up. How’s everything progressing? This might be the time to apply A/B testing, which will help you make better data-driven decisions.
- Work on improvements for all your users’ flow, and do it continuously. Even when you have already given your customers what they were expecting, you must focus on exceeding that goal. Users and context evolve, and so should your product. The process never ends.
Now it’s time to dig deep into UX design specifics.
UX and Customer Experience have an impact on the ROI of your company
3 UX design tools for an outstanding customer journey
If you want to make sure you’re doing all that you can do to create the best possible customer journey for your users, share these tools with your UX designers.
- Perform usability testing.
When you test a product with users you can evaluate several areas, the four most important ones are:- That it’s functional.
- That it’s reliable.
- That it’s usable.
- And last but not least, that it’s pleasurable.
Running usability testing is essential to identifying barriers and issues early on that could make a user abandon your product. - Build user personas from the beginning of the design process.
Creating a kind of fictional character will help you place yourself in your users’ shoes. Imagine what their behaviors, needs, and desires are. Try to figure out the persona of a variety of different types of customers and make their customer journey maps. You can do this with the help of research, field studies, or creating scenarios and stories. - Create wireframes and prototypes.
By creating basic layouts in low-fidelity, or even with paper, you’ll be able to test and design usability prior to investing in the actual product design. A prototype can also help you setting up digital mock-ups with interaction for target users to test.
UX and customer experience: their impact on ROI results
Measure the work you’ve put into UX and your customer’s experience by seeing if your customers and stakeholders’ interests align. While you’re working towards that, pay attention to the following specific metrics that will produce a direct impact on your ROI:
- Customer loyalty. Going through the numbers, you’ll see the changes reflected not only in customer satisfaction but in conversions and retention rates.
- Needed user support. As soon as you start investing in your product’s UX, the costs of user support should diminish. You’ll be getting ahead of a lot of possible issues your customers will now never encounter.
- Pivots and sprints. You’ll be able to make decisions using personalized data you’ve collected while improving your UX. You’ll realize when you can avoid development mistakes and find out earlier if your product doesn’t work how it should. You’ll be able to be flexible and pivot your focus.
Don’t forget to focus on the long term rather than the short term when it comes to ROI. Results won’t be instant. If you’d like to learn more about how your business can achieve results by improving your UX, access here to download a free infographic on the impact of VR on User Experience.
