Why should you care about UX design?
I am so excited to start contributing Harvard Business Review Türkiye blog with User Experience Design content. I wrote my first article about why business professionals should care about user experience design more than ever.
The original article is in Turkish and I wanted to translate it to English to reach wider audience.
" When was the last time you’ve been to a retail store? Why did you pick that particular store? What did you feel when you stepped in? Was the store manager helpful enough? Were you able to find a particular outfit or size easily Or did you make extra effort to figure out where it was? Was the check out process straightforward? Do you think you will go there again?
The answers to these questions is a good way to explain the “User Experience” concept from a daily activity. There are many companies from different industries have already started investing in User Experience talents. The demand is increasing day by day especially in technology companies followed by e-commerce, banking, online media and B2B services. User experience design of these products and services requires strong collaboration between many different teams including strategists, business development specialists and marketing managers.
User Experience (UX), focuses more on how to solve the user’s problem and how to provide them with an easy and intuitive experience more than how to give an aesthetic pleasure. It includes different processes that different parties should be involved such as market research, competitor analysis, UX design and development. That is very crucial to understand user behavior and expectations deeply to stand out in the competition and provide users with stellar products and services — which is directly related to meeting the business goals. Today, it is more likely to see the impact of UX in many industries including e-commerce, banking and online media.
E-mail newsletters have been an increasingly important channel for acquisition and engagement for e-commerce players. That is why UX plays a key role in increasing conversion and building engagement. When information architecture is strategically designed with relevant insights and handful of user behavior data, it is more likely to create a medium for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. UX has a strategic role in e-commerce where it can transform an information for what causes an undesirable user behavior into useful and delightful interactions.
Banking is another vertical that benefits from UX. A successful UX is a must-have in banking applications to provide customers with seamless banking experience, where customers can manage their accounts easily or make transactions safely from anywhere anytime without going to a branch. That means to creating new revenue channels by engaging with customers more efficiently where they have a great medium to introduce new products and services.
Similar to banking and e-commerce, online content creators are also investing in building meaningful interactions as a part of their customer acquisition and retention strategy. I had the privilege to work at Time Inc. and New york-based independent media company Refinery29, where I observed how UX can make significant impact on meeting marketing and sales goals. For example; Refinery29 has over 21 million unique page views per month and aimed to increase mobile shares. They focused heavily on understanding mobile behaviors and habitual activities of the target audience. It was found that WhatsApp is used as an important medium where target audience share content. Refinery29 realized that instant messaging would be a great opportunity to increase traffic from the mobile shares and streamlined the experience by adding the “WhatsApp share” button to its share options. In a short amount of time, mobile shares were increased by 8%. Marketing team focused on data-driven decision making and provided insights into the UX team and UX team focused on experience strategy and finalizing the design deliverables.
UX is becoming increasingly important on the lifecycle of products and services that contributes to sectoral growth. Today it is wise to constantly think about user-centered design as a part of business strategy and to integrate UX strategy to marketing and sales goals. If you would like to see familiar faces more often in your store, that path crosses with UX.”
