UX Should Be Every Modern Businesses' Number One Priority

Essay discussing the importance of User Experience (UX) Design to modern online business development

INTRODUCTION

UX stands for User Experience (Norman, 1988), and the term ‘‘User Experience’’ refers to how human beings interact with physical or online products (Babich, 2017).

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Users are primarily customers, but the designation is a more encompassing term, as organisations are not always technically selling anything.

‘‘Products’’ can be anything from physical shops, to call centres, to websites and apps. Basically, whatever an organisation purposefully presents to a potential audience with the aim of engaging them, is technically a product.

In modern application, when we hear about a product’s UX, in the vast majority of cases, the product being referred to will be a digital or online product such as software, websites, and apps. ‘‘UX’’ as an acronym is synonymous with digital/online User Experience (Trenkner, 2015).

To illustrate, it would be rare for one person to tell another that a high-street retailer’s UX is poor. They would say that their customer service is poor. The training that retailer’s staff received would most likely have been called ‘Customer Service Training’ as part of an overall Service Design strategy.

There has been a huge recent increase in the importance of digital UX Design to businesses. Ten years ago, even in the IT industry, hardly anyone had heard of UX. It has only recently become a stand-alone process. That is not to say UX Design hasn’t always existed, it has, in the background, but it has now become of primary importance. I will illustrate in this essay why UX Design is now so important to modern online business development, and how it came to be so important.

Digitally, UX Design had fallen under the remit of the general Web Designer, and, physically, under the operational umbrella of Customer Service and/or Service Design.

Nowadays, digital UX professionals are in huge demand as the need for their specific skills continues to rise. Essentially, there are two main roles within digital UX as a profession – Researcher and Designer. Researchers look into the market and then conduct various usability tests on website, application, or software prototypes, typically in incremental rounds. Designers initially create prototypes based on the findings from the first ‘discovery’ phase of research. They then amend their designs accordingly - should the ongoing research indicate that is what the target users want.

Basically, UX Design is digital, user centred design – it is making the ‘customer’ the absolute focal point of design decision making. The reality of such an approach is that all digital product ideas have to be rigorously and continuously tested with authentic members of the target markets. As a result of this testing and adaptation, the theory is that the product/service is bound to be appealing and successful when launched to the mass market.

It comes as a surprise to many that digital UX Design and user testing haven’t always been so popular and emphasised. I will now endeavour to explain when and why UX Design became as important to online business development as it is today, and why it may be even more important in the future.

PAST

The term User Experience originated as recently as 1988 in renowned Designer Philip Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things. The first job on record to feature User Experience in its title was a role Norman accepted with Apple in 1993 (Lyonnais, 2017). That is also the year that ‘‘UX’’ was used as an acronym for User Experience.

Modern digital UX Design as we know it today really rose in prominence in the 1980s with the advent of Personal Computers (Nielsen, 2017). Companies like Apple and Microsoft had to overcome the obstacle of the public’s fear of this new technology. They intended for Personal Computers (PCs) to be in every home. To achieve this aim, they knew the UX of their PCs would have to be excellent.

That was the start of modern UX Design, and its importance then skyrocketed with the advent and growth of the Internet in the 1990s. This growth has continued to the present day. The Internet took the importance of digital UX to a whole other level. The Internet is one of the greatest success stories of all time. Its uptake and growth have been astonishing.

With this growth, businesses suddenly had almost unlimited opportunity for growth, but at the same time, they faced unchartered territory in terms of the challenges they faced to impress potential customers via this new medium. Who knows what works? The only way really to find out was via usability testing. Otherwise, companies were taking a significant uninformed risk.

Before businesses could adapt to the impact of PCs and the Internet, the digital landscape changed again with the recent advent of smartphones and tablets. It quickly became clear that a design for a website for a PC rarely looked or performed optimally on mobile-size screens.

Public uptake of the use of smartphones and tablets has been phenomenal and rapid. At least as many people now ‘surf the web’ on their mobile or tablet as they do via their PC (Cullen, 2016).

PRESENT

UX is most closely associated with website and app design for desktops and mobiles, but also includes software.

It is easy to see from the history described above why digital UX has become so prominent and dominant in so many industries. The Internet offers the ongoing opportunity to make huge amounts of sales with an almost unlimited target market. Regardless of the nature of a business, having a UX-optimised online presence is very likely to make a significant, positive impact on performance.

Businesses were just adapting to performing business online via desktops when they were then almost immediately and almost unexpectedly required to adapt to perform impressively via mobile/tablet devices.

Nowadays, the consumer/user has an incredible array of similar options literally at their fingertips. The user has more reason than at any other time in history to be demanding. They call the shots. Businesses must now double up their efforts to please potential customers from the first second of their engagement.

Recent studies have revealed just how important good digital UX Design has become to business performance and thus decision making:

79% of users say if they have a poor experience on a site, they will go back and search for an alternative. 61% of mobile users said that if they did not find what they are looking for on a website, they will quickly move on to another one (Google, 2012)

84% of companies expect to increase UX measurements and metrics (Tempkin Group, 2014)

73% of companies not currently investing in UX testing will be doing so soon (Charlton, 2013)

90% of users have stopped using an app due to poor UX (AppDynamics, 2014)

77% of mobile Internet searches take place at home or work even when there is a desktop PC nearby (Google and Nielsen, 2013)

83% of users say that a seamless experience across all devices is somewhat or very important (Young, 2014)

81% of shoppers research online before buying (Business Wire, 2013)

In terms of return on investment (ROI), investing in digital UX Research and Design yields a return of ten to a hundred times. One pound invested leads to between £10 and £100 in return (Pressman, 2014).

It is clear that business, in general, has, at the same time, and across every industry, experienced an unparalleled fundamental revolution. It is also clear that many businesses are struggling to adapt to the changes.

Digital UX Researchers and Designers are in huge demand, but the problem is that both roles are so new that there is currently a significant shortfall in skilled UX professionals. Not just anyone can fulfil either role, so many businesses are having to make do with designers with no specific in-depth UX knowledge. The largest companies with the biggest budgets are recruiting the best UX talent.

Digital users across the board now literally come to expect a seamless, pleasant experience across all devices (Paunovic, 2017) as a minimum requirement for their ongoing engagement and possible custom. There are many businesses of all sizes who cannot currently offer that to their users, and they are increasingly experiencing the negative consequences of that being so.

Really quite suddenly, there is something ‘new’ (digital UX) that now must be a huge priority for all businesses. This is a big problem for businesses with no ‘extra’ money to invest in upgrading their digital UX. With regard to the benefits of good UX, they have to speculate to accumulate. If they cannot afford to speculate, they have no chance of being able to accumulate. Therefore, seemingly, the UX Design revolution is going to mainly benefit businesses who have a substantial budget for UX.

The statistics above go to show just how hugely important UX is to modern online business development. It is clear that moving forward, effective mobile UX Design is going to be extremely important for businesses to get right.

There doesn’t appear to be any sign that mobile use is going to decrease, whereas all signs point to it increasing.

Many local physical businesses benefit from mobile-based service searches (Jeffs, 2018). So, even though they may not have anything to directly ‘sell’ online, and their operations are purely physically based, having a UX-optimised online presence will still help convince users to give them a try in the physical world.

FUTURE

Overall, the future of UX is exciting but messy. The more a business of any size focuses on improving their user’s digital UX, the better.

Now that many businesses are aware of the financial sense of the investment in digital UX, standards are increasing across most industries – and that is great news for the user. Users are essentially driving this change, for their own benefit.

It does, however, put a significant burden on small and growing businesses with small budgets. It is quite the case that the rich may get richer and the poor may get poorer – if the rich hire all the best UX Researchers and Designers.

In rebellion against this, many tech start-up companies are prioritising UX and trying to lure the best talent by giving them scope to design their role and contribute to revolutionary, game-changing products (Angel List, 2018).

Smaller and traditional businesses have to build their way out of the ‘mess’ created for them by the PC and Internet booms. They have to now adapt to survive because the majority of users are not going to put up with poor digital UX just because they want to support small businesses. Typically, most users care most about having a good experience and receiving what they perceive as good value for money. Small/niche businesses must start to at least be able to compete with the larger companies in terms of UX.

It is imperative that small, physically based and focused businesses develop an online presence with good UX and build a digital reputation as that is proven to translate to overall business growth.

For the larger companies, the future of digital UX is exciting, but also daunting. New markets are again rapidly emerging. Technology is developing at an incredible speed, and Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and wearable technologies are increasing in popularity with users all the time.

The level of investment required to develop products for these technologies is enormous. Therefore, spending a substantial amount of money up front on UX Research and Design will definitely, in most cases, be a priority.

Some of the leading thinkers in UX believe that the upcoming technological revolution is exciting, but others believe that the emphasis should be on making existing UX considerably better and simpler (Nielsen, 2017).

Designing for digital accessibility is also coming more to the fore and that is likely to continue into the future. It can be difficult to redesign old sites to make them accessible but making them so from the start is not so complicated (Stanley, 2018).

CONCLUSION

The importance of UX Design to modern online business development is immense and increasing. It is hard to see anything happening in the world of business that would lead to the importance of digital UX Design decreasing any time soon.

The business requirement for excellent digital UX Design brings with it considerable challenges. Businesses of all types and sizes are struggling to modernise and update their online presence and UX. There is a huge shortfall of high-quality User Researchers and UX Designers. The hiring process is largely confused, and many people in IT and recruitment still don’t really understand what UX Designers and Researchers do.

Without economical innovation from smaller businesses, overall, they may find it increasingly difficult to compete with larger businesses where they once could – user experience.

Overall, the growth in the importance of UX Design to business is a major positive for users/shoppers/people everywhere. It literally means that the world is, in this way at least, becoming a better place to experience as the user (human being) we are.

REFERENCES

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