ShareIt was in Forrester’s Top Technology Trends for 2014 report where they stated that a great digital experience is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a make-or-break point for your business as we more fully enter the digital age. So with that in mind, it’s critical that you consider and incorporate UX into your next website design process. UX Consultant, Michael Dravnieks explains how to get started with UX and some of the results you can expect to achieve.
Video Transcription
Hi and welcome to coast TV – my names Michael and I’m a UX consultant here at coast.
So I want to talk a little bit about UX and why it’s important. UX stands for user experience but it’s not all just about the users. A good UX process will take business needs and user needs and find that sweet spot where they overlap. That’s really important that we discover both because there’s no point in creating a wonderful website that looks fantastic and your users love, if it doesn’t help you to make money. So it’s really important to remember that good UX converts. And we can use a lot of the same techniques that we use to discover user needs, we can use these techniques to discover the business needs as well. Things like workshops, surveys, telephone interviews, labs and contextual interviews they can be used to discover both these sets of needs and it’s really important that we do that.
When you’re planning a new website, it’s really important that you have all the information in place that you need at the beginning like a full set of information. Now most people have some analytics data in place which is great. Now analytics data with tell you some basic information on your users, how long their spending on the site, where they came from, when they landed on the site, the kinds of pages they’ve visited and some basic information about their behaviour on the site, but it doesn’t really tell you why these things are happening. So that’s where user experience techniques come into play here. So analytics data really just tells you the what and UX techniques can tell you the why, we’ve got to take the questions posed by analytics data and find the answers with your users and then when you’ve done that you’ll have the full picture and full set of data that you need to plan your website.
Now a good UX process can produce some really good results quite quickly and it can directly affect the bottom line, so your ROI (Return on investment). Now I said earlier that good UX converts so you can expect to see a improved conversion rate after a good UX process. That in turn helps you to optimize your advertising spend instead of pumping more money into PPC (Pay per click) campaigns, a better conversion rate will mean that you do more with the traffic that you already have. Now the other side of this is that a better user experience means happy customers, loyal customers who are more likely to convert, therefore more likely to buy again and also happy customers will also tell other people about your website or products and services and that personal recommendation is really important because its exactly that, it’s a personal recommendation that is the kind of thing that is really difficult to buy with money, so happy customers, an improved ROI are two of the things that you can expect to see from a good UX process.
If you want to learn more about UX, you can get in touch with me through the coast website – I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something from it and maybe I will see you soon.