Determining ROI for UX Investments
A study published by Forrester Research makes it clear that UX projects can have a significant influence on how much money a business earns. When companies used UX based on excellent design systems, they found that their websites:
- Converted 400% more consumers.
- Improved the willingness of customers to recommend products by16.6%.
- Increased customer willing to spend money by 14.4%.
Increasing conversions by 400% should grab your attention. Take your amount of sales generated today and multiple it by four. That’s the number of sales you could have by investing in an ROI project that revamps your UX.
Your UX ROI Depends on Your Current Design
Obviously, you can’t count on every UX project increasing your sales by that much. If you already have an excellent UX, then you might only increase conversions by 25%. It’s impossible to know until you look at your current design, recognize opportunities for improvement, implement a new UX design, and measure the results.
Some common flaws for websites and apps include:
- Slow loading times,
- Confusing menus.
- Unclear instructions.
- Erratic design systems between products.
The more issues you find, the more chances you have to improve the ROI on your next UX project.
If you want to focus on making your design better to boost conversions, you should start with:
- Making simple, unique UI and UX elements.
- Adding options for real-time customer support.
- Creating landing page design elements that will get customers to buy.
- Improving SEO elements to attract more traffic to your website.
You Won’t Know the Financial ROI Until Later
Naturally, you want to know the financial ROI of your UX project. Studies can only show general trends in how improved UX leads to increased revenues and profits. You will not know your business’s financial return on investing in UX until you finish the project, update your design, and wait for customers to respond.
Keep in mind that your financial ROI will not improve dramatically over night. It may take a few weeks or months before people start visiting your site and spending more money. Don’t rush the process. Trust that your team’s work will lead to go things. Research shows that improved UX will get the job done.
UX Projects Can Save Your Design Team Time
It may sound counter-intuitive, but UX projects can actually save your design team a lot of time.
Make sure the project starts with creating a design system that your designers can use across multiple products. Once your team has all of the design assets that it needs, future prototyping and design updates happen much more quickly.
A design system includes approved:
- Color schemes
- Icons
- Templates
- Editorial guidelines
- Image assets, such as photos and images
- Interactive elements
When your designers start working on future projects, they can turn to the approved design system instead of starting from scratch. Suddenly, a job that may take 1,000 hours turns into a project that gets finished by the end of the week.,
A Design System Also Makes Your Projects More Efficient
Many small businesses have already discovered the benefits of starting UX projects by creating effective design systems. The financial benefits of a UX project aren’t usually apparent until long after your team has a design system. Once you have the system in place, though, you can expect your business to benefit from:
- Faster time to market for new products.
- Fewer errors that force designers and developers to track down mistakes.
- Easier onboarding when you hire new team members.
- Better collaboration between team members using the same design system.
- More accurate user data that lets you compare how people respond to updates and new products.
It’s difficult to measure the ROI of efficiency. In financial terms, though, you can expect to spend less money because your teams finish projects faster. You may discover that your business can release more products, or you may decide that you need a smaller group of designers working on your prototypes.
Good UX Reduces Customer Support Questions
Good UX should make websites and apps intuitive for users. When a new customer picks up your product, they should know how to use it within seconds. They may continue learning new features over time, but the basic functions should reveal themselves immediately.
At least two important things when you make products more intuitive for users:
- You get happier customers who keep using your product.
- Your customer support team receives fewer questions and complaints.
Let’s focus on the second benefit. How much does your business spend on customer support? You have to hire and train people to answer questions via phone, email, and chat. You have to pay for the extra office space and equipment that your customer support employees need to do their jobs. If you adopt a chatbot to answer common, simple questions, you have to pay someone to make the bot for you.
Customer support can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
Remember, your ROI involves more than the additional money you can make. It also involves the money that you save.
UXPin Makes UX Projects Easier
The ROI of UX projects increases even more when you have a great tool that helps your designers create design systems and functional prototypes. UXPin fills those needs easily. The design and prototyping platform includes abundant features that will help your team members collaborate in real time, work from a shared library of approved assets, and understand which ideas work best.
Do you want to learn more about how UXPin can help your business improve its UX ROI? Sign up for a free trial that lets you explore UXPin’s features. Once you see the advantage of using software that combines design with prototyping, you’ll know that you have the right tool for your products.
