The 5 Best User Experience Improvements to Generate ROI

User Experience (UX) Design is a school of design thinking that transfers to virtually every facet of any digital product. Whether we’re talking front-end websites, mobile apps, or general software - anything that is ‘used’ by someone can benefit from user experience design.

The concept is simple: design your product and its interface in a way that prioritises user experience.

Crucially, perhaps, UX design thinking posits that the process is never really ‘done’ - it’s an iterative journey that aims to gather insight into how users interact and improve that consistently.

When you’re putting in the effort and innovation required to perform great UX design, it’s important to make sure you’re investing your efforts into changes that will provide tangible benefits and ultimately, generate ROI.

But measuring the ROI of UX design isn’t straightforward, we can break it down by KPIs such as:

• Increased total conversions

• Increased customer satisfaction/decreased bounce rate

• Decreased support queries, customer service calls, issue logs or any other ‘flag’ feature where a user indicates a problem with your product and has to seek help from your business

• Increased team efficiency: with good UX, your team should be doing less work to fix problems and should therefore gain efficiency to work on other things

• Decreased costs for training or other ‘skilling up’ resource

While direct ROI measurements can be hard to find, here are the top UX design tips and improvements we would suggest for maximising ROI.

1. Deep user research

Improvements rely on insight. Without knowing how users interact with your product, you cannot design to make their experience better. By undertaking user research, you can find a user’s goals and how they use your product to achieve them.

The above is also true in web design, where 76% of customers claim that the most critical role of a website’s design is making it easier for them to find things.

To make that clear: good UX relies on knowing what a user wants. User research helps to establish not only what users want, but also how they act. It generates critical insight into how you should design your product.

We would recommend building out detailed user journeys for each user type you have - building a picture of who they are, how they utilise your product and what they want. We do this in our client discovery sessions, but you can replicate a smaller version of this on your own.

2. Remove extraneous features

Attention spans are poor (more on that later) - so make sure your product focuses on its intended purpose. Look at your product, then ask yourself whether you’re giving users a straightforward way to fulfil their goal.

Don’t be afraid to cut back on distractions and other confusing elements - remember the famous Shakespeare quote: ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ - make your product simple and easy to use.

Better yet, use the User Research process we suggested in tip 1 to see which features/elements of the product users are having the most success with and which they dislike or are bouncing off - then either make changes or cut them entirely.

3. Make conversion easier

Whatever your conversions look like - whether that’s a product purchase, enquiry or something else - make sure you are practising user experience design to make that process easier.

Calls to action should be clear, easy to interact with and relevant to the user’s need. Make sure each call to action is prominent and, if necessary, opt for buttons that leave no room for interpretation.

Make any actual mechanics of conversion easier by minimising the steps and input required from a user. For example, removing additional fields from a sign-up form or combining the payment method page with the basket edit page on an e-commerce app.

4. Improve load speeds

UX isn’t all about visual design - it’s about the experience. Load speeds are a crucial element of how a user experiences your product. Back in 1993, Jakob Nielsen outlined user response times as follows:

• 0.1 seconds is the limit for having a user feel as though a system is reacting instantly

• 1 second is the limit for a user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, but by 0.2-1 second the user notices that the system is ‘working’ on their command rather than completing it instantly.

• 10 seconds is the limit for keeping a user’s attention focused on the dialogue and, as such, any load longer than this should either have a progress indicator or a way for the user to interrupt the operation.

Even now, in 2021, users are more likely to abandon your product if they face long loads. In web design, this is even more apparent. A study found that a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by over 100%.

To decrease user bounce and ultimately improve conversions, design your product to prioritise load speeds and be aware of the limits of user patience.

5. Implement testing & monitoring

Say you follow all of our advice. You perform detailed user research, design a less cluttered interface, implement better calls to action and reduce load speed. Now what? Without proper testing, your UX experiments may be fruitless at worst or sub-optimal at best.

By implementing both manual and automatic tests, you can ensure there are no mechanical errors preventing conversions.

Go further and introduce monitoring, tracking user behaviour throughout your product to see which changes have worked and which need more thought.