UX101: The ROI of User Experience

What is "user experience"?

User experience, or UX, is how a user/visitor/customer/client learns, feels, and perceives your product or website. At it’s core, it’s a subjective experience and it is possible that no two experiences may be the same.

For your website, this means that when a user comes to you, you fulfill all their needs with little extra effort on the user’s part. For exemplary user experience, all this must be wrapped up in a simple, elegant package that merges great design, text, marketing, and ultimately makes the user feel wonderful about visiting your site or using your product.

Tricky, eh?

Why UX matters

These days every company and cause has a website. If fact, increasingly, these websites are getting good -- becoming rich resources with tons of information, ways to take action, and opportunities to make an impact.

Users are being bogged down by options, so if you want to have your message effectively and easily reach your audience, you need to lower the entry barrier. he websites that have consistently stood out were the ones that were pleasant to use

You want to design a website or tool that is easy to learn, easy to use, and then ultimately provides a value in the user’s life that makes them want to come back again.

What is experience design?

User experience design is just that: specifically designing your website in order to lower the entry barrier and to lower the cost for visitors to take action -- whether it be donating, signing up for an email list, or sharing your content.

It takes the focus off assumptions of what will work, and grounds it in solid research based on target audiences.

6 Basic steps of UXD

1. Understand users and target market. Do your research! Figure out the cold hard stats about who is visiting your site or conduct market research to determine the broad picture. Then, don’t just plot your demographics, actually break out your typical users into specific user personas. User personals are fictional characters representing your real life target users. Is your audience both investors and potential clients? Break them down and analyze what features on your website are most relevant to each user. And then break them down again. Chart out your imagined individual’s background, where they live, their attitudes and emotions, as well as key personality traits. This makes you think of your user as an actual human being rather than a faceless, general statistic.

2. Analyze user tasks and goals. Create stories with these personas, mapping out specific scenarios they might come to you in. Think about where your user is visiting you from, what is their goal in visiting your site, and what would be needed to fulfill that goal or solve their problem. You aren’t going to solve all their problems, but this process helps you determine which ones you can.

3. Establish usability requirements. What are the top actions you want users to perform on your site? What exactly is the sentiment you want users to come away with after they leave your site? Figure out which features and what information are of higher importance to your business goals, and then create your design to highlight and easily lead users to those areas.

4. Prototype design ideas. Don’t just dive right into your design. Take the time to wireframe, create concept maps, and plan story boards. Try cheap or free tools like XMind and Freemind for wireframming, or Pencil and LucidChart for prototypes, mockups, and diagrams.

5. Conduct usability tests. Walk through your designs not just accounting for what the user wants, but also for what mistakes the user might make. Are they confused by your email sign up box? Do they give up before registering because of some difficulty? Do they make it to your social media links? Are they using an outdated browser? Figure out how to reduce those user-mistakes.

Check out Browsershots to test how your page will look in different browsers, from popular IE, Firefox and Chrome to even lesser known browsers like SeaMonkey and Galeon. Loop11 will give you a trial for conducting usability tests at a tester’s convenience and Five Second Test will test for first impressions by giving testers five second preview of a site and then asking for feedback.

6. Repeat as necessary! Test, tweak, test, tweak, test.

Great! So where’s my ROI?

So, what do you get out of investing in user experience design? What is your return on investment? You’ll be serving the needs of your viewer/customer. When your user knows you’ve got them in mind, you’ll build a trust that will keep them returning as you keep improving their experience. Plus, through testing and analyzing, less effort will be spent on building features and designs that aren’t user friendly and would turn a user off your site.

Measuring the exact value of UX is not the easiest process. It’s not as simple as measuring page views and email signups, although with good UX you will certainly see those increase. Look for qualitative factors -- like a decrease in user questions or complaints, an increase in repeat customers and referrals, positive messages left via social media -- to show that users enjoy your product and find it easy to use. If you take the time to evaluate these indirect results, and map them back to your business goals, you should soon notice:

1. Increased productivity, decreased costs
2. Increased sales
3. Increased brand loyalty
4. Increased brand evangelism

One way way to track is through Google Analytics’ beta "In-Page Analytics" feature, where you can visualize exactly what links and how often visitors are clicking on your site. If you’ve create a page for a campaign, try an A/B test of two different landing pages. Implementing an effective UX design will surely show better results than a cumbersome, difficult-to-navigate page will. ClickHeat is another free tools that will give you a visual heatmap of clicks on a specific page.