With the advent of the digital revolution, customers around the world are demanding omnichannel experiences from the companies they interact with daily. In the case of the mobile application explosion, enterprises of every level began to deploy their products as mobile apps. While being product-driven has been the focal point of business growth for the last few decades, more and more enterprises are recognizing a critical piece of the puzzle in maximizing their disruption strategies. The heart of digital transformation is the user experience.
What is UX?
User experience (UX) is a broad, multidisciplinary field that covers many roles and touches every stakeholder involved in a product, service, or experience. The aim of UX is to help users achieve their end goal with ease, delivering extraordinary functionality from the technical standpoint while making sure the user’s interactions are pleasant. According to UX guru Thierry Raguin, there are five elements to optimal user experience: discovery, learning, efficiency, performance, and enjoyment. When customers come to your site or mobile app, you have only seconds to grab their attention — further indicating that investing in UX optimization is vital to gain trust and brand recognition right away and to help retain those new users moving forward.
A platform is only as good as the UX it provides, and businesses that fail to diligently adhere to UX best practices may see their digital transformation strategy fall short. Entire enterprises — like Toys R’ Us and Blockbuster — have fallen due to lack of attention to customer experience (CX), which is a larger umbrella of practices and strategy that is concerned with how an individual interacts with a brand as a whole. UX focuses more on the individual interaction with a brand’s digital products or services, and undermining the importance of both can lead companies like Airbnb and Uber putting entire industries out of business, solely by deploying digital transformation strategy that hyper-focuses on the end-user.
On the enterprise level, easy navigation of robust platforms is critical to business success. Software or applications with poor UX creates barriers to adoption among staff, making it very likely that employees abandon the application if it’s not intuitive. Employees do not have the time or energy to waste on an un-intuitive platform. Poor UX, no matter how old or new the application is, creates inefficiencies in processes, and slower, more time-consuming processes don’t empower employees to do their best work. This results in significant lost ROI that could be avoided with great UX.
In addition to profit loss, UX is a major factor in weighing options between different product vendors for enterprises. For instance, a Product Marketing Director needs a marketing automation platform to optimize marketing campaigns. The director has narrowed down its options to two vendors with the exact same functionality, but with different user interfaces (UI). The director went with one over the other for the simple reason that one vendor had a more modern UX.
Abandoning the poorer UX did not require second thoughts. That other vendor lost a sale. This is the sad reality for enterprises that fail to prioritize the user experience.
The business value of UX
A large majority of businesses today, while understanding UX plays a critical role in increasing user satisfaction among product and service offerings, underestimate the value that UX brings to the table.
According to Kissmetrics, 16 percent of mobile users would abandon a page if it didn’t load within 1-5 seconds. 30 percent would abandon after 6-10 seconds, and for 3 percent of the mobile users, you have less than one second to grab their attention and keep it. What does that mean for CEOs? Lack of quick action means money lost at the bottom line.
The ROI of investing in UX is tremendous. In a recent study by Forrester, better UX involved in websites and mobile apps showed that “a well-designed user interface can raise a website’s conversion rate by 200%, and a better UX design up to 400%.”
For banks, the ROI of UX was solely dependent on collecting and acting on customer feedback, a critical piece in any customer experience strategy. SalesForce conducted an in-depth study to understand how customer experience was impacting revenue growth, discovering that the number one difference between banks with growing revenue compared to declining or plateauing revenues was the initiative in responding to individual customer feedback. According to the study, “growth banks were twice as likely to be taking action on individual customer feedback than their counterparts who weren’t.”
UX optimizes every touchpoint of the user journey, regardless of the scenario UX is improving. Efficient UX is seamless, invisible; you only notice the UX is bad when it is broken. Maybe your enterprise is embracing digital processes and resources to better improve productivity and operations, or your want to offer digital delivery options of your products and services to your customers. Whatever the case, consumer-centricity is the differentiator between a revenue-stagnating enterprise and a growth-positive enterprise. Quite literally, ignoring user experience will make or break your enterprises’ digital transformation success.
How to prioritize UX in your digital transformation
If the heart of digital transformation is UX, then the heart of UX is empathy and action. At its core, great UX is only achieved when we honestly listen and try to understand our customers. That newfound knowledge can then be used as a powerful insight into how to enhance the product and service experiences of those people.
When considering adopting UX best practices in your digital transformation, view everything from a macro level. Make decisions with patience and with your users in mind — in this case, your employees. Don’t hastily execute a digital transformation strategy without assessing the end goals. Ask yourself questions from the point of the user:
- How can our solution better help them reach their goals?
- How would adopting a new digital transformation strategy affect the current systems in place?
- What do they need from a software solution?
These questions can save headaches later on, plus maximize the effectiveness of the solution you provide to users.
The last enterprise standing
The enterprise world is well-aware that only being concerned with optimal functionality is no longer a viable standalone growth strategy. In order for organizations to survive being eclipsed by increasingly volatile markets and competitors, embracing UX is not just wise, but a requirement. It’s about the experience, the emotional response a customer has when interacting with your company.
Without UX, a company will fall through the cracks in scaling its customer experience strategy as it adopts mass digitization of its products and services. By putting UX first in your company’s digital transformation strategies, you can be sure that your existing customer base will continue to pour into your business by remaining dedicated patrons. You’ll attract new users easily, too, all because your enterprise prioritized truly understanding and solving the needs of your clients and/or consumers.
Hundreds of enterprises rely on Processmaker to digitally transform their core business processes. Learn more about how we can help you put your users first at www.processmaker.com.
About ProcessMaker:
ProcessMaker is a low-code business process management and workflow software. ProcessMaker makes it easy for business analysts to collaborate with IT to automate complex business processes connecting people and existing company systems. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina in the United States, ProcessMaker has a partner network spread across 35 countries on five continents. Hundreds of commercial customers, including many Fortune 100 companies, rely on ProcessMaker to digitally transform their core business processes, enabling faster decision making, improved compliance, and better performance.
