Founders and entrepreneurs are very familiar with the difficulties of building a successful product. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, 95% of new products fail. Combine this with the fact that almost 20% of new businesses fail within the first year and we have a pretty good case for a solid product strategy.
But even good products with great product strategies often fail to reach a large audience or build a sustainable user base. One of the oft-cited reasons for this is poor user experience or UX. In many instances, startups focus on adding new features in the beginning and don’t consider UX until the very end — often like a nice-to-have feature. They are often afraid to focus on the UX too early in product development. In this article, we attempt to give a definite answer on when startups should focus on their UX. But first, let’s define UX and why it is important for startups and small businesses.
What is UX design? What is the difference between UI and UX design?
In the most simple terms, UX design or user experience design is the process of ensuring a smooth, easy, and intuitive experience for someone who uses your product. The goal of UX design is to offer the best experience to a user at every step of their journey.
UX or user experience is how someone interacts with a product and how it feels to them. This comes down to its features, the value the product offers them, how easily they can access the features, its overall look and feel, and how enjoyable it is. Even the ease of learning to use a product or a solution plays into the overall UX.
While the UI or the user interface plays a huge role in the user experience, designing the UI and the UX are not the same. They are very different and distinct aspects of product development.
For instance, if we’re designing a desk, the color scheme, shape, and where the different drawers are placed, among other aspects, determine the user interface. On the other hand, how it feels to touch, if it’s easy and comfortable to work for long hours, if it’s easy to reach across the table, if the drawers are easy to open and close, and similar aspects would determine the user experience.
When it comes to a website or a mobile app, the color palette, the design theme, and where the different buttons are placed will define the UI. The website speed, ease of hitting the different buttons, and how easy it is to do different actions on the app will determine the UX.
What are the benefits of a great UX? Why should startups care about UX design?
UX design is a crucial element of product design. Here’s why startups should invest in UX design for their products:
Fast user growth and adoption
One of the main factors that determine product success is how fast you can build a user base and how quickly the users make it part of their daily workflow. As you can imagine, UX plays a huge role here.
Keep in mind that a great UX is defined by the value it provides to the user. If your audience finds good value in your solution and they can learn and use it easily, your user base will grow quickly.
Improved user retention
It’s not enough that the users join your platform or adopt your product initially, it’s also important that you’re able to retain them. Even if your app promises to solve their pain points, users will leave the app if they can’t use it easily. If the app takes too long to load or produce results, users may explore other options or migrate to another app.
By investing in UX, startups and businesses can keep their user base on their platform. When users have a great experience, they won’t even see any need to explore other options.
Less demand for customer support
Users contact customer support when they’re not able to figure out a product by themselves. If they can’t access a specific feature or if they’re stuck at a point, they will reach out to customer support for answers. So if the product has a poor UX, the organization will have to invest in a larger customer support team.
But by building a product with a good understanding of the user base and their pain points, the organization can offer a smooth experience to the user.
Contacting customer support is often the last resort for customers; so if the product can help the user figure out the answers by themselves, it can significantly reduce the need for customer support. A great UX can also allow the organization to reduce its investment in developing training materials and user guides.
Better ROI for the end-user
Customers invest in a product when there’s a justifiable ROI for them. This ROI may come from the reduced time they spend on a specific task or the number of people needed for a specific task. It could even be in the form of an app reducing the cognitive load for a user and helping them focus on the task.
When an app has a great UX, users can focus on getting the results instead of trying to learn how it works or waiting for the app to respond. A great UX will allow users to accelerate their workflow and be more productive.
Improves brand perception
An organization’s products reflect its standards and quality control. When a product has a great UX, it doesn’t just affect how the users feel about it, but rather about the entire brand. Users will associate the brand with a good experience, ease of use, and great value. It will make customers more inclined to try other products and solutions from the brand.
Improved ranking in search results (for websites)
Search engines want to offer users the best experience and take this into account when ranking websites for search results. If your web app takes too long to load, if it’s not mobile friendly, or if the images don’t have alt text, search engines may push your website or product down the search results.
This can impact your user acquisition rates.
Gives your business a competitive edge
Even if your product offers the same features as your competitors, you can still stay ahead of the game with a great UX. A great UX offers more value and ROI to the user for the same price. In other words, your UX strategy is imperative to your product’s success.
“An effective UX strategy relies on aligning a business’ goals with the needs of its users. Without those two fundamental pillars in alignment, you risk designing a solution that users don’t value or creating an unsustainable, unprofitable product.” – Kelli Lucas, President, Chief Design Officer, and co-founder at LunarLab
When should startups start focusing on UX design?
The hard-to-swallow answer to the question is that the UX design should begin before you create the initial wireframe.
For a great user experience, you need to understand your audience well. Your team needs a clear picture of what troubles them, what their pain points are, and what will provide value to them. To get this, you have to invest in user research. This research should drive your design process from the ground up — from the features users will need to how they’re implemented.
Throughout the product journey, you’ll have to work on the UX. But if you don’t place enough importance in the beginning and later attempt to improve the UX, you’ll be severely limited in what you can do.
Without a solid UX, you’ll also struggle to get users for your solution. When checking out a completely new product, users rarely spend a lot of time. Once you’ve gained a sufficient audience and you have good reviews, users may be a bit more patient to find value in it. But initially, if it doesn’t work as easily as they expected, they’ll leave. And odds are they won’t come back.
As experienced product owners will tell you, changes are more expensive down the line when building a product. This should also be a further incentive to start working on the UX earlier in the product lifecycle.
Ready to get started on your UX journey? Contact us now
Are you struggling with building a great user experience for your product? Finding it difficult to understand your audience and what they struggle with? Reach out to us and we can help you. The LunarLab team has been working on UI & UX projects for many years with brands all over the world. We pride ourselves in building solutions that the users love and offer them the best experience.
