In the past few decades, we have seen a rapid blurring of geographical borders, making it very easy for people to access consumables and services across the globe. This coupled with a surge in e-commerce has made competition across industries fiercer. Around 97% of all consumers check for a company’s online presence before making a purchase decision.1 Similarly, more than 90% of B2B buyers reporting a superior mobile experience say they’re likely to buy again from the same vendor, compared with only about 50% of those reporting a poor mobile experience.2
An online presence is imperative to conducting business operations. From enabling customers to discover your products or services, to making sure you provide continued after-sale support and subsequently upselling, each part of your business is now digital, if not cloud-based.
UX, or User Experience, as the name suggests, is how a user interacts with products, services or processes. To understand this interaction, we must understand who the user could be for a business. When UX was a nascent field , the term ‘user’ was used interchangeably with ‘customer’. But with its evolution where Customer Experience emerged as a subset of its own, we realize that a user could mean anyone that interacts with a specific product or service, which could include employees, management, business owners and partners, vendors and of course, customers.3
In reality, most businesses know to focus solely on customers while designing products or services. However, studies suggest that successful businesses cater to the varying needs of all their users. Increasing efficiency and productivity by seamless integration of systems, providing real time updates to business owners, streamlined communication and collaboration and data & analytics based decision making are some instances of how enhanced UX (and not just CX) are imperative to business success.4
A popular statistic cites that every dollar invested in UX yields an ROI of up to $100, which translates to a 9900% growth.5 Traditionally, the growth of a brand was influenced by its product attributes. For instance - the feel, the perfume, the packaging, the color, etc, of a luxury soap. A brand would spend on marketing (majorly ads - print, TV and radio) only if their product did well in the market. The marketing spends were a result of the sales. The competition was low, the demand was something that could be created.
Jump to the Internet era - a fresh brand must compete with established businesses in saturated markets, and consider factors like user satisfaction, product placement, brand perception, logistics, etc. On the flip side, established businesses must keep up with the ever changing needs of the market, requiring them to focus on aspects like customer retention, conversion rates, brand image, culture building, cost efficiency, customer advocacy, product innovation and scalability. Marketing drives sales and focusing on just the product is not enough for a business to sustain, let alone thrive. Fortunately, the value add of UX is manifold. The most widely accepted methodology of the UX process - empathize, define, design, ideate, prototype and test - is crafted in a way that it can be applied to any process or problem faced by any business irrespective of scale or geography.
In 2018, McKinsey Design developed an Index which was an auditing tool to evaluate the Design readiness of an organization. Most businesses studied were not entirely sure about how to approach UX design, especially if their processes have already been set for years. Over 50 percent of the companies admitted that they had no objective way to assess or set targets for the output of their design teams.6 To help businesses bridge the UX gap and help them understand where they stand is in comparison to the industry, design consultancies such as Left Right Mind delve into an exercise called UX Transformation - which, in its simplest form, is the process of studying existing systems to identify improvement areas and streamline them using various perspectives of users and stakeholders to deliver experiences that are holistic.
A classic example of UX Transformation helping a business keep up with the change is Netflix. What started as a DVD rental business has now revolutionized the small-screen viewing experience for the world. At the core of this transformation is an engaging, visually sound and hyper-personalized experience that places the user at the center of it. Seamless onboarding, clear information hierarchy, rich visual interface coupled with intuitive features like user ratings, suggested content, wishlist and the cherry-on-top ‘skip intro’ are some UX research led decisions that make Netflix the the largest video-on-demand service in the world, with around 260 million global paid memberships as of Q2 2023.7
A stellar user experience is indisputably one of the top contributors to improved customer satisfaction. However, true value creation is a function of a better overall experience, which can only be delivered by restructuring multiple processes within a business’s ecosystem. UX transformation entails studying the complex interconnection of these processes and creating a structured approach to improvements that create rewards for the user on various levels across multiple touchpoints.
Curious about how your user experience measures up? Reach out to us here for a UX consultation!
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