How Much Should Entrepreneurs Care About User Experience? What's the importance of UX, and how can entrepreneurs implement it with actionable steps?
By Murali Nethi
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In today's digital world, having a functional ecommerce site to sell your product or service may not be enough to gain a competitive edge in a clustered market. As businesses and consumers alike continue to adopt technology in their day-to-day tasks, shopping habits and preferences shift to deliver greater comfort, agility and ease of use.
Key aspects, such as user experience, are often overlooked when designing websites, and the result of this can often cause entrepreneurs to lose business.
Nielsen Norman Group defines user experience (UX) as encompassing all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services and its products. This includes the moment the user searches for a product and finds your page, checks out an item and up until receiving notifications and updates — all of this makes the user experience.
Let's take a closer look at why UX is so vital for businesses and how to further enhance this experience to ensure a sale.
The importance of UX
Imagine this: As the start-of-the-year holidays approach, a shopper goes online to look for a quick last-minute gift for his wife. He comes across your site at the top of his Google search and decides to shop at your online store. As simple as the task is, he finds himself taking longer than usual due to constant ad spam, misplacement of buttons and irrelevant content. Although the user is interested in your product, the frustration outweighs his needs, and you just lost business.
Many customers who leave a business say that they left because they felt that the business didn't care about them. This often translates into an increase in customer support cases, leaving customers blind to the status of their requests or with a very slow response. In actuality, UX should be associated with usability, fostering customer relationships and empowering users with effective communication channels and simple and quick processes.
The cost of an ineffective UX
It's pertinent that teams build the site around users' needs, habits and goals. Failing to perform a deep analysis of what the UX should be in the early design phases can result in a time-consuming task as developers spend time making changes after initial deployment. This consequently leads to an exponential growth in usability problems and a costly fix. The most cost-effective solution is to always design your site and usability with the end-user, or customer, in mind from the very beginning.
Related: Cryptocurrency Innovators Need to Simplify User Experience
What makes a great UX
At the end of the day, a site's goal is to help customers finish their business as quickly and painlessly as possible. This process starts while your online shop is still in development and always keeps your user in mind.
Ensure your site is accessible. Prioritizing inclusivity is no longer an ethical matter. You must ensure that everybody can consume your content. You never know where and when customers can come.
Your UX must be intuitive. Your content and page's flow should be digestible and helpful in a way that adds value to your audience. The end goal is to save your potential customers time and make them want to return.
Your UX helps your brand build trust. Spending resources on a killer logo and overall page design won't do much if your user experience is flawed. Having an easy-to-follow customer journey and user experience altogether helps build trust with your customers and can likely create brand advocates.
Related: 10 User Experience Design Trends You Need to Know About in 2019
Main takeaway
If you're a business trying to attract new customers through your ecommerce site, UX is king. It will dictate the future relationship between your brand and your potential clients.
An enhanced UX will help you gain a greater understanding of your customers, build brand authority, have positive feelings associated with your brand, and above all, sell more. All of these benefits come from the holistic experience from the initial click to ultimately customer loyalty. Customers these days need a quick turnaround and an experience entirely focused on comfort, agility and ease of use.
