RUSHING DESIGN CUTS INTO YOUR BOTTOM LINE – THE ROI OF USER EXPERIENCE
We are a culture of instant gratification. Hungry? There is a drive-thru calling your name. Busy? A grocery service will deliver straight to your front door. The gig economy is thriving, with on-demand services popping up all over the country, while these services sell convenience at a premium they would be unable to do so without top-notch User Experience. This design process increases the amount of money earned, money saved and customer retention, so why do so many businesses want to bypass a proven methodology for creating successful products?
The logic here is simple, the faster it gets to market the faster you start making money. We see this kind of thinking all the time, and ultimately it ends up costing your business more time and money. Which is why UX is the process of delayed gratification measured by enormous gains in ROI.
DEFINING A DEVELOPMENT BLUEPRINT
The average Engineer spends 50% of their time fixing foreseeable mistakes, at a cost of $85 - $100 an hour this is a large expenditure on top of the original development costs. Robert Pressman stated in his book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, that “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.” More simply put, spending $10,000 can save you $100,000 during production and $1,000,000 after deployment.
If your jaw is on the floor wondering how such a thing is possible, think about UX as a data-based user-centric blueprint for your project. This blueprint helps Engineers by:
- Defining clear user-tested requirements for the build
- Improves efficiency and prioritizes tasks
- Flushes out the Designer’s vision and the user’s needs
THE PROCESS BEFORE DESIGN
User Testing is the single most important step in creating a profitable product. It gives actionable insight into how real users utilize your system. We do this by gathering data through a variety of methods including gathering user feedback via asynchronous automated experiments, synchronous usability testing methodologies and heuristic evaluation or usability audits.
Performing these tests on prototypes helps to confirm the choices made by the UX team, validate the design strategy and create more satisfied users. MacAfee utilized this process on their ProtectionPilot software leading to a 90% reduction in support and development costs.
User Personas are crafted utilizing the data garnered from User Testing, allowing the Designers to craft a sketch of the user’s needs, goals, and observable behaviors. Utilizing User Personas has shown as much as 4 times the ROI versus projects that move forward without them.
TRANSLATING PROCESS INTO REVENUE
The bottom line in the UX process is that it directly effects KPIs for digital products. It increases conversion rates, decreases abandonment rates, pushes page speeds and reduces bounce rates. Amazon found that adding just 1 second to their page speed cost them $1.6 billion a year in sales. With 40% of people abandoning websites that take more than 3 seconds to load bad UX could be costing you a fortune.
Not focusing on user-centric design wastes billions of dollars a year, IEEE found that 15% of development projects are abandoned after release due to usability. This translates to $150 billion lost globally. Considering that $243 per customer is lost on average, investing 10% of your budget to see an 83% return is a no-brainer.