Measuring Your Return on Investment of User Experience

When it comes to a user's unique needs and approach to interacting with a digital product, the overall quality of their experience is determined by their connection with the environment, ease of use, accessibility and the emotional impact the product provides.

Understanding the importance of an accessible user interface, or UI, and a quality user experience, or UX, is essential in creating a successful digital product that can help save you money, increase revenue, promote your brand and, most importantly, create a satisfying experience for your customers — both existing and those you attract in the future.

Whether it be a website or an application, a good UX should always provide users with an easier way to access the information or features they desire while providing a coherent method for navigating.

While UX and UI may seem like complex concepts, each provide the most innate and basic functions of how your application will be used. Through the evolution of technology and design, people change in the way they interact with digital products and have preconceived notions of how applications should perform — as well as what features should be readily and easily available to them.

If you are currently in the process of designing an application, UI and UX should be considered during the earliest design phases to prevent costly alterations that may be needed in the future. For those considering the importance of overhauling their existing UI and UX, consider the benefits of creating a modern, more accessible experience for customers.

Rossul looks at ways of maintaining your existing brand and marketing strategy, while improving UX and UI through a multi-step process based on extensive research, testing and work-shopping. We work to provide an experience that reflects the latest design trends and changing user demands in the market.

Creating a more accessible UX will not only help you save money. It will also help attract new users, improve security, create new functionality and features and make your digital product more cohesive and responsive. While you might be on the fence as to whether you should invest in UX, consider that by doing so, you can create a significant and quick return on your investment, or ROI.

User Experience Benefits and How UX Drives ROI

While improving user experience at its core is about making a better way for your customers to interact with your digital product, it is also an important step in saving money in development costs, increasing revenue over the long term and attracting new users to your application.

Ensuring Your User Experience Design Is a Success

Simply changing the UX of your existing application without considering the principles of what will make your new design successful may not result in much of a change when it comes to saving money or generating more revenue.

Understanding your brand and existing marketing strategy, as well as your customer's needs, is essential when considering changes in the design of a UI and how you will create a better UX for your customers. A successful UX meets the needs of your customers while meeting your business's needs as well.

UX case studies have determined some of the reasons why projects fail, and those reasons include:

• Unrealistic project goals
• Poorly defined requirements
• A disconnect in communication between customers and developers
• Poor project management
• Poor development practices

Researching who is currently using your application and what features they are using most often is an important step when looking at a redesign. By researching your clients' needs and their particular expectations, you can garner a better understanding of what is currently successful and how to build upon those ideas to attract new users in the future. This will also help you set attainable goals when conducting research before moving onto additional information presented in the focus groups and testing phases.

The core principles of your business should be reflected in the design principles and framework in order to promote a consistent, quality experience when your customers are using your application.

Reducing Development Costs

While some businesses may have a staff of developers on hand, many offices do not have the resources for development and require outsourcing to accomplish the digital needs of their businesses. Development of any application is often a lengthy and costly process.

In addition, making alterations to a completed product will only incur further expenses. According to several UX case studies, nearly 15 percent of IT projects are abandoned, and on average, programmers spent nearly half of the time on a project reworking issues that were avoidable.

When designing an application or overhauling an existing one, focusing on what user experience will bring to your product will prevent you from needing to change it in the future. Extensive research, testing and analysis of user feedback is one way to ensure you're on the right track toward success.

Implementing design choices that make a product less accessible and create complex navigation problems that inhibit users, as well as adding features that are of no value or are unnecessary, can all detract from user experience. By avoiding development errors early, you can effectively save yourself money and prevent future engineering expenditures.

Increasing Revenue and Sales With UX

Increasing your revenue with a better UX is an effective way to boost your customer list, while staving off more expensive advertising and marketing strategies. By increasing the attachment a user has with your product and offering a UX that is more accessible, existing users — as well as new ones — will be attracted to your application.

If an application is difficult to navigate, confusing or doesn't perform the function intended, many potential customers may abandon your product before even making a purchase. This can result in a number of lost sales annually that could have potentially been garnered had the UX been better for your customers.

Customers who trust and enjoy their experience with your application will be more inclined to stick with it, which helps you build your brand and increase loyalty among your users. In addition, by analyzing customer interactions with your product, you can identify what works and what doesn't, which will help you build an even better UX in the future.

Simple changes in a design can go a long way, and by updating and improving your application to fit the latest expectations and trends, you will ensure your business remains competitive in a marketplace with evolving technological demands.

Increasing Competitiveness in the Market With UX

Because user interactions and expectations are constantly evolving, businesses that focus on the user experience can help maintain their competitiveness in the market. Researching what your direct competitors are doing to improve UX may help your business in the long term.

The easier you make it for people to use your product and have a better experience, the more likely they are to conduct business with you in the future. A better UX is one way of getting the upper hand on your competitors and attracting new clients.

By creating a UX that elicits an emotional response from the user as well as being useful, easily accessible and efficient, you can ensure you meet the standards required to create a more successful redesign. In addition to meeting your business’s needs and creating an experience that sticks with the design principles of your brand, effectively measuring the impact of the UX is important for identifying your ROI.

How to Measure User Experience Return on Investment

Measuring the ROI of your current UX is important when determining the advantages of creating a better UX. If a development project is completed on schedule and costs stay within the allocated budget, UX is successful in that it meets the expected requirements of the job.

While on the surface this is a great accomplishment, digging into the core of both user satisfaction and how the UX has helped generate revenue is another facet to the success of your application.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk, a behavioral scientists and author of a white paper concerning productivity in IT development, suggests three components to measuring the return on investment of user experience:

• Calculating the cost of errors - by calculating the total number of errors, multiplied by the average repair time, which is then multiplied by the product of the total employee cost and total number of employees, you can discern how much money you can save by improving user experience and reducing errors.

(number of errors) x (average repair time) x (employee cost) x (number of employees) = cost savings

• Calculating development and maintenance expenses - As mentioned above, development is often a lengthy and expensive process. You can reduce your maintenance and overall development costs by creating a better UX before the product is completed, thus reducing expenditures in the future.

By calculating the number of changes multiplied by the amount of hours needed to make the change, which is then multiplied by the product of developer costs by four, you can discern how much potentially avoidable changes will drain away in expenditures.

(number of changes) x (average hrs/change) x (cost of developer) x (4) = cost savings

• Calculating overall productivity savings - A better user experience will also lead to increased productivity. By reducing errors and development changes, your team can focus on additional products, reduce the time needed for customer support and dedicate time to new projects. In order to calculate productivity savings, the time saved in development, multiplied by the total employee cost, should then be multiplied by the number of employees.

(time saved) x (employee cost) x (number of employees) = cost savings

Some other methods of measuring your return on investment come from setting measurable goals and identifying targets for improvement. By reducing the number of errors, you will effectively save on development costs, as well as increase the efficiency and ease of use for your customers. Reducing development costs by focusing on UX during development is essential and will help prevent costly repair, maintenance, training and redesign projects in the future.

In addition, a better user experience can help you increase the number of users, help you retain existing customers and increase traffic to your application — all of which are measurable through analytic tools.

With a better user experience, it’s possible to increase your revenue through product sales that could be lost due a frustrating customer experience.

How Can Rossul Help Create a Better UI/UX for Your Business?

With more than 15 years of experience in creating highly usable and intuitive designs for businesses, we will apply our expertise to create a high-quality user interface and user experience that will maintain the integrity of your brand and current marketing strategy.

We can help improve the usability and usefulness of your applications, creating an optimal user experience for your clients. Our extensive research and testing of our projects makes us one of the top of UX design firms in North America.

At Rossul, we work hard to create designs that work effectively for all mobile devices as well as desktops. Our User-Centered Design (UCD) concept ensures your online content is both usable and worthwhile for your customers — no matter which market you are in or are looking to enter.

Because so few businesses offer the capabilities to conduct a proper UX and UI redesign effectively, partnering with a company that understands the complexity of the process is important in the success of your digital project. For that reason, we work closely with our clients and take the time to learn what their business demands are and how their users interact with them.

With a proactive, empirical approach to UX and UI design, we can create enterprise-class web applications that will help save you money, increase sales and satisfy your customers. Contact our office to arrange a meeting with one of our team members today.