User experience design is all about ideating and creating positive experiences that real users find engaging and helpful. For that reason, every UX team member must always strive to optimize the user-centricity of their products.
But if you’re new to UX, you may wonder why you should put in so much effort. Why is UX important enough that every business aims to deliver the best possible user experiences? In today’s guide, we’ll answer that question for you.
How Does Great UX Affect the User’s Experience?
Needless to say, the first people who benefit from excellent UX design are the users. It’s only fitting that when discussing why UX design is important, we start with its influence on the user experience.
1. Solved Problems
To deliver meaningful experiences to users, UX designers and researchers need to strive to solve the users’ problems.
That’s why one of the first phases in the UX design process revolves around empathizing with and contextualizing target users. Through thorough UX research and analysis, UX researchers can identify common pain points in the user’s experience.
They can then share these actionable insights with UX designers, who will define a clear problem statement. This statement will govern the design process, ensuring that every deliverable reflects the solution to the problem.
Overall, you can’t create products that solve or even know of the users’ problems without UX.
2. Improved Personalization
While we’re discussing UX research, it’s worth mentioning that it can also benefit the user experience in other ways. Specifically, UX research is the gateway to crafting digital experiences that are more personal and resonant with the user.
UX researchers understand that their target user base could, and often does, comprise many different user segments. Across these segments, user behavior, mental models, and preferences will likely differ.
By creating user personas, researchers can use demographic and psychographic data to contextualize each user segment. From these personas, designers can tailor their designs according to each segment’s preferences, expectations, and behaviors, personalizing their experiences.
Needless to say, when a digital experience is personal to a user, that user will find it more valuable.
3. Intuitive Navigation
Throughout the entire process, UX designers always look to optimize every aspect of the user’s experience. Although aesthetics are important, this goes beyond visual flourishes. UX also allows designers to make their product’s navigational structure much more intuitive.
Through methods like card-sorting sessions, designers can create layouts and information architectures that allow for fluid in-product navigation. By designing such a structure, users can easily find their desired content without virtually any mental effort.
When digital products don’t unnecessarily lengthen or hinder the user’s experience, the user is likely to return to them.
4. Innovative Visual Design
Although UX and UI design are usually the subject of many “versus” debates, UI design is crucial to UX.
With the support of user research, a combination of UI design and graphic design can make any user interface compelling. Of course, this synergy goes further than simply creating aesthetic color palettes and choosing stylish fonts.
In actuality, UI design stems from a deep understanding of the user just as much as UX design. This means that UI design can create stunning visuals that impact the users’ emotions. For instance, if designers want their users to feel relaxed, they could use blue hues, serif fonts, and cute animations.
Additionally, by following UI design principles, designers can create hierarchies that act as visual guides for the users’ focus. All in all, combining graphic, UI, and UX design can add visual intrigue to the user experience, boosting user engagement.
How Does UX Affect Product Design?
So, you know why UX is important for a product’s users. However, to truly understand UX’s value, you need to understand how UX affects product design.
1. Usability
A product’s usability has a monumental influence on its success. Thankfully, a key stage of the UX design process is the stage in which designers conduct several usability testing methods.
Through user testing, UX designers can assess how easy or difficult their products are to use. With valuable user feedback, they can identify and fix usability issues, which subsequently optimizes the product.
2. Accessibility
User experience design is all about creating digital experiences that all user types can access and enjoy. That’s why every designer, without question, must make their designs accessible to users with cognitive and physical disabilities.
With the accessible design practices of UX, product teams can ensure that they aren’t excluding any users from their products. This isn’t only morally right, but it’s also key to establishing a positive brand reputation and adhering to accessibility laws.
3. Responsiveness
A user’s experience with a product should be consistent regardless of the user’s device. In other words, users shouldn’t think desktop software is superior to mobile software because of its design.
Responsive design is a significant part of UX. Designing with responsiveness in mind means that you can adapt your product’s content and structure to different screen estates. It requires a deep understanding of human-computer interaction, which UX designers have.
So, by unifying UX and product design, the user will enjoy an optimized, universal experience on any device. This is a great way to avoid making mobile users feel like an afterthought, which, in turn, improves brand loyalty.
How Does Good UX Benefit Businesses?
As you can imagine, it’s not just the user or the product that benefits from good UX. Businesses that invest in good UX can also enjoy the success that comes with such an investment. Here’s how great UX can benefit a business.
1. Brand Loyalty
Exceptional UX will never fail to show the user that the design team behind a product respects their needs. The personalization that comes with great UX also lets the user know that the design team values their unique preferences.
When your designs make users feel this way, you’ll turn potential users into loyal customers, increasing your customer retention rates.
2. Increased Conversion Rates
You can’t have great UX without the support of great UI design that guides the users’ attention effectively. With the clever use of color, negative space, fonts, and contrast, UI designers can create eye-catching yet non-intrusive CTA buttons.
It’s no secret that visible, compelling CTA buttons will inspire users to complete the actions you want them to. The result: your designs directly contribute to the increase in your conversion rates.
3. Reduced Development Costs
The UX design process stems from user involvement and empathy, as well as rigorous research and user testing. In great UX, no design decision is without research, and no design is without quality assurance. Best of all, these research and testing methods precede the product development/implementation process.
This means that UX designers can spot and rectify any design issues or obstacles before the costly development process starts. So, for businesses, prioritizing UX is a sure way to save valuable amounts of time, money, and resources.
4. Increased Sales and Profits
Simply put, great UX leads to increased sales, which in turn means increased profit margins for a business. With this additional revenue, a business can grow, which benefits the business just as much as it benefits the user.
With more money, businesses can take on more projects, upgrade their tools and technologies, and hire more talented professionals. From that point on, every product those businesses produce will deliver even better user experiences and generate even more sales.
Why Is UX Important: Let Page Flows Give You Inspiration
Knowing the value of UX is learning how to become dedicated to the entire design process. Through your commitment to great UX, your users and your business will thrive.
That said, you don’t just need to rely on your commitment; you can also rely on excellent, inspirational resources. This is where Page Flows enters the pictures.
Page Flows is the home of vast collections of top-of-the-line, annotated user flow resources. Our collections come from nothing less than the most user-centric brands and prosperous industries. This means that you’ll never struggle to find inspiration from a user journey that closely resembles the ones you’re creating.
Speaking of user journeys, we also ensure that our flows capture the user experience in full. From onboarding and customizing settings to getting help and general browsing, we cover every part of the user’s journey.
The question, “Why is UX important?” has the same answer as the question, “Why is Page Flows important?” You need both to take your designs to the next level. Go to Page Flows now to learn what intuitive user navigation looks like from the best designers in your industry!
FAQs
What is the most important aspect of UX?
The most important part of UX is user-centricity. You can’t create UX designs without considering the users you’re designing for.
What is the main purpose of UX?
The main purpose of UX design is to create intuitive, accessible, and helpful digital products from which users derive value.
What is the value of UX in business?
Excellent UX design can help any brand, regardless of size or industry, meet its business goals. When a brand’s products help users achieve their goals, they’ll see an increase in their customer retention and conversion rates.
