How great UX builds customer loyalty

I was once asked by a packaging engineer if the product I was working on could be redesigned because it didn’t fit their packaging.?

You can guess how that conversation went! I felt like saying…. the product is the reason why there even IS a box!??

But the user is why there is a product. So the product design must be centered around the user first. Product design, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design are closely related but distinct and important disciplines. We can argue that product designers and UX designers exist both in the digital and physical world but UIUX or user interaction experience sits in the digital?

There is much debate around the semantics of product design and its related disciplines, but broadly speaking, product designers are the ones driving success across the entire, end-to-end user experience. Generally they will be involved in the entire design process, including brainstorming, UX, project management, and business-related processes. UX designers generally focus specifically on refining the experience of using a product. As Tanner Christensen - ex Lyft, Atlassian, and Facebook product designer puts it: “[UX is]the practice of creating goal-driven, user-informed products or features, through product thinking, visual design, and interaction design.”?

Regardless of definitions - with commercial objectives to consider, as well as customer needs to address -? how can product designers approach the process of delivering design for great UX and why is it so important??

Financial value of UIUX?

User Interface (UI) and UX design, which can also be called “digital product design”? refers much more to the practical part of design with a narrow focus on the millimeters of a button for instance, or what headings are included in the hamburger menu vs what are in the page footer. When a company invests more in the UX of its products or website, it can improve the ROI in five overall areas:

• Increased customer satisfaction, also business-to-business satisfaction – because who doesn’t love well-designed products that give them what they need and want (or in many cases, what they didn’t know they needed).
• Boosted overall revenue and conversion – because of greater ease of use and resulting customer loyalty.
• Lower customer support required - lowering the company’s costs.
• Reduced development waste – which increases development efficiency and thus saves money in the development phase.
• Reduced risk of building the wrong thing. User research is a helpful tool to narrow down on what your customers find usable and valuable.

Clare-Marie Karat, a principal UX consultant and former IBM researcher, stated : “A rule of thumb is for every one dollar invested in user experience research you save $10 in development and $100 in post-release maintenance.” A return on investment that would be difficult for any business leader to ignore.?

Full product design - beyond the practical

But the design experience in full encompasses much more than the practical. With design, it's also about emotions. I believe there must be an emotional element involved in designing great products, so that the user is more likely to feel an emotional connection with it.?

Likewise, things like craftsmanship and aesthetics are important. These elements aren't necessarily anything to do with the practical user experience, but they are essential elements of great design and most people are hard-wired towards better crafted, more beautiful products because of the “Attractiveness Bias”?

Source: The Pocket Universal Principles of Design: 150 Essential Tools for Architects, Artists, Designers, Developers, Engineers, Inventors, and Managers

The dollar value of attributes like aesthetics and craftsmanship are more value-based than cost-based if we relate them to pricing. Aesthetics is very segment specific and while there is something that is considered universal, designers leverage aesthetics to connect emotionally with specific personas. Often, designers create a ‘mood board’ with the purpose of profiling who would desire what.?

So - the process of designing products that work well, are easy to use, practical to assemble, disassemble, and recycle? Products which also make you feel something when you use it? Excited to pick it up, over and over again, proud to be aligned with the manufacturer and unwilling to use any other versions??

I’m afraid there isn’t a straight line or any templated process I can give you. There are multiple squiggly lines to get from A to B. But over time, like the course of a spinning ball journeying through a pinball machine - the line will slowly get straighter with parameters placed around the edges.?

These parameters will be raised with more context of the user needs, boundaries set by the corporation, further insight from research groups, psychographics and demographics of the ideal users. In the current day of Industry 4.0, with data gathered from products that are ‘always on’, we actually have a fairly good understanding in real time of what consumer behaviors are. So incremental improvements across the design process are getting more and more accurate.?

Radical Innovation

With insights drawn from data of existing user journeys, however, there are limits as to where we can get to. While they may be timely and accurate, these insights won’t necessarily be aspirational. They cannot be innovative. That can only come from lateral thinking - "the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring," as Edward de Bono reminded us. In other words, taking what we know and recontextualizing it, to unlock new pathways and create newness.

Creativity is the key to creating those radical innovations that are baked on the side of your bread-and- butter products.?

The products that come out of nowhere, take you by surprise and with the seamless UX that means they become essential to your everyday life.?