Customer experience and satisfaction have always been the utmost priority of businesses, irrespective of the decade.
From when your customer care executives were the only real connection between you and your customers to today, it’s been revolving around consumers only.
Nothing has changed ever since except that customers today are even more demanding and impatient. And a mere call back from your executives will not satisfy them enough to stick around to your brand.
The theory is the same: “customer satisfaction and experience matter the most” the way you deliver the same has changed with the ever-evolving methods of marketing and customer touch points.
Your ideal customer today isn’t sitting behind a table waiting for your call. They are observing your brand from afar; before they even decide to visit you, they are the ones calling the shots here.
UI UX is one of the thousand ways you deliver this satisfactory experience to your customers.
Here’s a quick game- tell us two primary ways customers choose to interact with their preferred brands and businesses in this digital decade.
Website and apps. That’s true.
And what happens when your website fails to retain those who, after researching about you through different mediums, say social media finally takes the leap of faith? Your potential leads slip through your hands like sand.
This is where UI UX becomes essential for you as a business owner. But before we go ahead and discuss how it impacts your website’s and app’s retention and other nitty-gritty of the same, let’s take some time to clear our basics.
Understanding UI UX: what is it, and how does it work?
There are two ways one can typically help you with the concepts of UI UX. The first one is the following:
UI means how various machines and software interfaces are designed keeping usability in mind. UX, on the other hand, is described as the experience that the UI will aim to deliver to the user.
If this definition alone couldn’t clear your concepts, which we are sure it didn’t, let’s try the second way out:
The interface of Youtube Music somehow looks like this.
The typical job of a UI designer is to design this interface so that it is easy for the user to navigate through the app. Good UI always makes the app more responsive, accessible, and efficient.
Now to be more precise, the UI designer would have focused on many elements of this whole interface, including the colours, typography, spacing, icons & images, and more.
All of this is what brings together a user interface. However, having an easy-to-use and user-friendly interface is deficient if it’s not backed by UX research and inputs.
Think about it. We’ve been talking so much about how UI has to be user-centric. But how do you figure out what your customers need after all?
That’s precisely where the entire concept of user experience comes into the picture.
Now, if we talk about user experience, then we will say it is everything that goes behind making this interface into something that a user can engage with.
User experience is the approach that a UX designer takes to understand what the audience requires, so the final product is tailored for your target audience. Think of this as the research stage behind curating a product made for a specific audience to cater to their precise needs.
Although the whole UX design process is not constrained to research itself, the process has varied stages where the product goes through several stages of testing, iterations, and prototypes through which the final product is then guided.
You can probably understand the whole concept better through this demonstration. In the following image, the components of both UI and UX are identified separately, along with the parts where they both overlap, which usually confuses people.
Since the concept is clear now, let us jump on to the next essential part.
Why is UI UX so important for businesses in 2022?
If you at this moment are wondering: can design have that much impact on your business? Then you really should read ahead.
1. For better customer satisfaction-retention-conversion
Satisfaction and experience are the two most important things for a customer, and that is what we’ve been conveying to you since the very beginning of this article. But that is critical to deliver considering the competition and rapid technological advancements. Everything from your website’s loading speed to the quality of your product and how all of that is displayed on your website decides if your user will go back satisfied with the overall experience.
As per a report published by the Baymard Institute, everything from a bad checkout experience to a messed-up interface can significantly impact the conversion and retention rate of businesses. Why? Dissatisfactory customer experience.
The study also reveals that a better UX can help these businesses change and increase their numbers significantly.
Thus investing in good UI/UX can be a great decision if you own a business.
2. To earn a return on investment.
You can reap more benefits from a robust UX strategy than you might think. According to a paper published in 2016, “The Six Steps For Justifying Better UX,” each dollar spent on UX designs yields $100 in revenue. Thus, it’s proven that better UX can also seek improved ROI for your business.
Moreover, it’s the decade where stuffing keywords and phrases on your website won’t be enough to manipulate the Google algorithm into pushing your SERPs. What content you put on your website matters even today, but another major benefactor of this is the visitor bounce rate.
Which usually is high when users find it challenging to engage with your websites. The higher the bounce rate, the lower your website will rank. Solution? Provide them with an interface they can’t say no to.
3. For a marketable brand presence
When you invest in a well-designed app that looks after and furthers your customer’s pleasure, you take a step toward creating a marketable brand reputation. Moreover, any step taken to develop and nurture a positive relationship with your consumers counts; it adds value to your brand. Obviously, you can only impress them with what they can see and operate with, like an app, which is why it has to be good, but it doesn’t mean you underestimate the process they don’t come across like the UX research. It’s everything combined that will help you.
4. To help push visibility on SERP.
Ranking on SERPs is essential for any business today to excel in their market. But it doesn’t happen overnight, and as we mentioned earlier, keyword stuffing alone doesn’t help today. Google’s algorithm has become even more complex; it’s dwelling deep into user behaviors, bounce rates, user patterns, and time users choose to spend on webpages – impressing Google and getting into its good books requires you to put all-inclusive efforts – because from SEO to UX everything matters today!
Undervaluing the advantages that UI UX can bring to your business is a big mistake, and we hope you know that by now. You can reap plenty of long-term benefits if you prioritize the same. By keeping these pointers in mind, you can ensure that you deliver an optimal customer experience and achieve your business goals.
