With the advent of the digital revolution, customers around the world are demanding omnichannel experiences from the companies they interact with daily. In the case of the mobile application explosion, enterprises of every level began to deploy their products as mobile apps. While being product-driven has been the focal point of business growth for the last few decades, more and more enterprises are recognizing a critical piece of the puzzle in maximizing their disruption strategies. The heart of digital transformation is the user experience.
What is UX?
User experience (UX) is a broad, multidisciplinary field that covers many roles and touches every stakeholder involved in a product, service, or experience. The aim of UX is to help users achieve their end goal with ease, delivering extraordinary functionality from the technical standpoint while making sure the user’s interactions are pleasant. According to UX guru Thierry Raguin, there are five elements to optimal user experience: discovery, learning, efficiency, performance, and enjoyment. When customers come to your site or mobile app, you have only seconds to grab their attention — further indicating that investing in UX optimization is vital to gain trust and brand recognition right away and to help retain those new users moving forward. [caption id="attachment_1452" align="aligncenter"]
(Courtesy of UX Collective)[/caption] A platform is only as good as the UX it provides, and businesses that fail to diligently adhere to UX best practices may see their digital transformation strategy fall short. Entire enterprises — like Toys R’ Us and Blockbuster — have fallen due to lack of attention to customer experience (CX), which is a larger umbrella of practices and strategy that is concerned with how an individual interacts with a brand as a whole. UX focuses more on the individual interaction with a brand’s digital products or services, and undermining the importance of both can lead companies like Airbnb and Uber putting entire industries out of business, solely by deploying digital transformation strategy that hyper-focuses on the end-user. On the enterprise level, easy navigation of robust platforms is critical to business success. Software or applications with poor UX creates barriers to adoption among staff, making it very likely that employees abandon the application if it’s not intuitive. Employees do not have the time or energy to waste on an un-intuitive platform. Poor UX, no matter how old or new the application is, creates inefficiencies in processes, and slower, more time-consuming processes don’t empower employees to do their best work. This results in significant lost ROI that could be avoided with great UX. In addition to profit loss, UX is a major factor in between different product vendors for enterprises. For instance, a Product Marketing Director needs a marketing automation platform to optimize marketing campaigns. The director has narrowed down its options to two vendors with the exact same functionality, but with different user interfaces (UI). The director went with one over the other for the simple reason that one vendor had a more modern UX. Abandoning the poorer UX did not require second thoughts. That other vendor lost a sale. This is the sad reality for enterprises that fail to prioritize the user experience.
