Why good user experience is good for business

When it comes to the online landscape, your potential customers are quite literally inundated with options. More than ever, your organisation faces an unprecedented challenge: standing out amongst the noise. Factors like how well you communicate your offering, how well it chimes with your audience and how you price yourselves remain crucial. But in the digital space, there’s an underestimated element that can make or break you: user experience (UX).

In this blog post, we’ll look at just how pivotal a good user experience is in driving growth and success for your business.

We’ll cover how focusing on creating a strong user experience helps you to:

• Boost conversion rates
• Increase brand loyalty and advocacy
• Gain a competitive advantage
• Improve your organic (SEO) performance

We’ll also cover some fundamentals:

• What is meant by “user experience”
• What makes a good user experience
• How do you measure good user experience?

What is user experience?

User experience (UX) in its simplest form is how a user feels when they interact with your website. Note that user experience also applies to digital products and apps too, but for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll focus on websites.

Every element that makes up your website – design, imagery, content, interactive elements, navigation – as well as how it performs (how quickly it loads, etc.), influences the user’s experience.

What makes a good user experience?

A good user experience is about making users feel positive about using your website. At the very least, your website should be usable. But truly good user experience goes way beyond that.

Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb sets out the key aspects of good user experience:

• Valuable – at the very core of user experience, your website should be providing value to the user
• Useful – you should be fulfilling a want or need
• Usable – as we’ve touched on, your website should be easy to use, everything should work as expected, and nothing should be broken
• Desirable – the design and brand elements should make users want to interact with you and evoke a positive response
• Findable – your website or content should be navigable and discoverable on and off-site
• Accessible – your website should be accessible to people of all abilities
• Credible – your users must be able to trust you and the information you’re presenting to them

Why good user experience is good for your business

Now we’ve defined user experience and what a good one looks like, let’s talk about some of the key reasons why you should focus on delivering a good user experience, and what this can mean for your business.

Boosting conversion rates

It’s pretty simple – having a positive experience on your website will make people want to buy from you. It’s estimated that improving your UX design could quadruple conversion rates. By thinking carefully about how users move through your site, how they interact with your content, and how they get pointed to next steps (i.e. call-to-actions), and designing everything to be as easy and seamless as possible, you greatly increase the likelihood they’re going to convert. Mobile-friendliness can have an impact too – 67% of people are more likely to buy a product or service from a mobile-friendly site.

Increase brand loyalty and advocacy

A positive experience creates a positive feeling around your brand for the user. First of all, this means they’re likely to interact with or buy from you again, and it also means they’re more likely to advocate for you. Brand advocacy is a powerful tool in marketing – you’re essentially creating a group of loyal customers who are happy to recommend you or promote you via social media or good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. While the wider customer experience helps to determine whether someone becomes a brand loyalist or advocate – it all starts with the user experience.

Get a competitive advantage

As we’ve already touched on, the online marketplace is exceptionally crowded. You’ve got to be aiming to deliver the best digital experience in your industry or sector to stay ahead of your competitors. Suppose a potential customer has a frustrating experience on your site. In that case, they’ll head straight for one of your competitor’s sites – 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor as a result of poor customer experience.

Improve organic performance

Improving all aspects of your website that influence user experiences such as performance, responsiveness, navigation and content all help towards boosting your performance on organic search. There’s also a fair bit of crossover between the kind of metrics you’d be looking to measure around UX, and Google’s Core Web Vitals (more on that shortly). Focusing on improving your site’s performance against Core Web Vitals will improve your chances of ranking highly in search results.

How do you measure good user experience?

One of the best ways to measure your user experience is to get feedback from your users. You could obtain direct feedback from them by interviewing or surveying selected users or customers of your site. You get “indirect” feedback from them using a tool like HotJar to track user journeys from when they enter your site to when they exit, and you can watch screen recordings of how they navigate through the site, identifying sticking points or bottlenecks along the way.

As we’ve briefly touched on, other aspects of the experience like performance can also be measured using frameworks like Google’s Core Web Vitals, which set out a number of metrics around load speed, load efficiency, accessibility and best practice. The higher your scores, the better your user experience is likely to be.

Summing up

Delivering a good user experience is not just good for business, it’s essential if you want to stay competitive, keep customers coming back and turn them into brand advocates. It’s not enough for your website or digital product to simply be “usable” – it has to demonstrate and provide actual value for your users and leave them feeling positive about your brand.

Are you providing the best possible experience for your users? Get in touch and we’ll share with you a free video audit of your website with actionable tips for how to improve UX.