Good design starts with a full understanding of the users’ needs, requirements, and goals.
But unfortunately, you won’t be able to arrive at those critical insights without the appropriate step called user testing.
Today more and more companies are focused on creating great experiences, and UX research can be extremely helpful in building a robust product strategy and solutions for users’ needs.
Moreover, the well-built website generates better customer traffic, and an improved user interface leads to increased conversions.
So, in this article, we want to share with you the most crucial reasons why you should invest in UX research.
What is User Research?
User research is the difference between designing based on assumptions and creating something that solves a real user problem. It covers different methods starting from the interviews with your target audience to quantitative measurements of return on investment (ROI) on your user experience design.
Here are four ways user research can bring significant income to your business and increase customer loyalty.
1. You can save your budget
If you create a website or app with low budgets, you can easily fall into the trap. It happens when you want to save and find that such a decision has long-term costs.
In this way, UX can help you because investing in the user research you save your money in several areas.
Let’s speak about developers. In most cases, they spend more than 50% of their time on various reworks. And fixing each bug after creation costs are almost 100x more than the error would have cost during the prototyping and wireframing stage.
In this case, if the company invests time and budget in a user experience process before going to development, it saves money.
Revision and development aren’t the only areas where you’ll save money through UX. Spending on client support services will fall, as well.
Conducting usability testing will reduce usability issues. This is the primary goal of the prototype — checking the product by testing it on real users before going to code.
2. Make your users be the best salespeople
Sometimes online reviews can make or even break a sale. Based on different research, almost 80% of potential clients are looking for reviews and recommendations because they trust them. And happy users and good reviews directly impact your product’s growth.
Good user experience is also an important thing to make users happy since they can recommend your product. To be sure that your product meets all user requirements, you need to follow a UX-aligned product roadmap. Just create user research slots into the initial phases and ensure that the UX strategy influences product development. The good example here is the LendGenius company website.
3. Increase your team motivation
It’s tough to build the code and design interfaces all day. And very often your product teams can be demotivated, especially if they know that their work and time are going to waste.
But using user experiences, you’re able to keep employees motivation and their productivity. You need to believe in your team and help them with all the necessary things like rest, a good workplace, etc.
Involving workers in the UX research and design process, you will allow them to understand that the product meets user needs. And if the team believes in the value of it, users will see it too.
4. Save someone’s life with UX
You can save someone’s life someday.
For example, let’s consider Jeff Jahn’s thoughts on how the right design of smoke detector alerts can reduce the deaths in house fires. Or another sad story about a child who died in hospital because the nurses can’t deal with the software.
Fortunately, not all UX design stories are about life or death. But as we see, bad UX has disaster results, both for users and companies.
Bottom Line
To reach the most out of UX research, you need to determine the project stage, goals, the type of data, and choose the place where you want to conduct your research.
Good user experience is one of the essential differentiating steps for businesses. If a user has a negative experience while using your product, then most likely, he/she won’t come back. Most modern users make their decisions based on how appealing and usable your site and how it meets all their requirements. So, you only have a few seconds to build a positive impression; however, if your UX is right, you’ll get much more.
Mónica Rodríguez is a writer, art historian, and editor at LendGenius. She specializes in Art History, Art Conservation, History, Literature, Finance, Tech, Wellness, and Travel. In her free time, she’s usually roaming the halls of the museum or the local bookstore surrounded by stacks of books.
