Ever heard about the $300 Million Button? If you haven’t heard about it, cool would be an understatement, perhaps the right term would be revolutionary. In 2009, a major eCommerce company increased its annual revenue to $300 Million just by changing the “Register” button to the “Continue” button -– that’s how crucial UI/UX is.
UI/UX is how the user interacts or experiences your product or software and how crucial UI/UX is. Psychologists concluded how good design and development work could make a positive impact on sales. According to Forbes, a well-designed UI can increase the conversion rate of your website by up to 200%, and a better UX design can increase conversion rates by up to 400%. It also plays an important role in mobile applications. According to research, mobile app uninstallation rates have increased by 80-85%. A dull UI/UX is identified as one of the reasons for an app uninstallation. So, presenting an app with the best possible design and user-friendly interface is essential. A few clicks should be enough to impress the user with the app’s screens and interface. Or else, it won’t take much time before the user uninstalls the app.
A great example of a startup company that benefited from a well-designed UI/UX is Canva. Since launching in August 2013, they currently have 55 million monthly active users across 190 countries. Canva's team realized that they needed to do more than just create an intuitive, user-friendly graphic design program, they needed to inspire people who weren't graphic designers to believe they could design. Their UI and UX make it easy for non-graphic designers to create and edit designs. This resulted in Canva's rapid expansion, reaching international markets.
Our CDO Dan and our CEO Dave
Dan: It's less about how it looks but more about how it makes the users feel while they're using your product or how they accomplished what they needed to do on your site or in your app. There is good UI with bad UX and vice versa, “the marriage between good UI and UX is ideal” and one could say that there is a bias for beautiful interfaces to automatically have good UX but personally, I would focus more on nailing down the experience first before even thinking about how to make it look pretty.
Dave: It's really the way a product feels when you use it and it’s about the emotional experience that you remember after you use a product. It's really about the experience and therefore it’s emotional which makes you want to go back and it makes you want to launch it again or click on something again.
Dan: With UI/UX, you can totally transform the direction of your product and ultimately, how you do your business. It’s not so much on the end result of having a beautiful and fancy app or website, but more on the process of getting there. It's about trying out new things -discovering problems, exploring solutions, and connecting with the stakeholders or end-users. UI/UX lets you get to know more about your business or product and users better.
Dave: We have so many options for products that deliver a superior experience that commands more of our attention. We only launch a handful of apps on our phones every day. We have tons of them installed that we usually run out of storage. We only use a few of them daily and I think that's one of the areas that makes it so important. This is also one area that really separates good products from great ones. I think the classic example of that is the iPod back in the day, we didn’t have phones that had music players.
The only thing phones could do back then is dial phone numbers. Back then, sending SMS messages was still very rudimentary and not possible. Even if others were using mp3 players, the iPod had an experience that was far above the rest and I think it was because they focused on UI/UX. It was a hardware device but the way that you interacted with the device made it so easy to find and play your music, and I think that this is one of the great examples of why this is so important.
Dan: Knowing your business and your users better helps you have a better insight into what problems you’re solving, what particular business you’re building, and who exactly are you building it for.
Dave: One of the most important ways is when the UI/UX of a product should force you to think about the journey that your users will go through. It's important that you approach this by removing yourself from the familiarity that you have with your product and you think about it from the perspective of your users. What we see with start-ups and in the tech space is we're so familiar with the steps that we take in our own product and what a user should do, that we actually forget to have the perspective of what a user would actually do when they don't know what the next step is. This will help you gain insights into your users and your product.
That's why this can really be a game-changer. Because you're actually starting to understand the journey of your users, just fundamentally good advice because you're thinking like your users. You're not coming at it from “this is the solution”, you’re really coming at it to identify their problem and how your product solves it.
Dan: I know budget and time is a limited resource so if there's anything that needs to be put first is the core value and experience of the product. It’s really about what they want to build or what they want to solve. So, iterating and experimenting fast is key to finding product-market fit and Symph can help with that.
Dave: The way I think about it is that they are the two most important things for companies. Because of the constraints that companies face, they tend to overlook UI/UX. Constraints such as, “we don't have funding, we're just trying to validate, we’re struggling to get users, we want to spend on advertising, we want to spend on customer acquisition”. Those are all the normal constraints that companies will continue to face, and there are constraints that should actually make you build better products. You can actually gain a lot by spending time thinking about the user journey and how your product could help users achieve their goals. There is no need to re-launch or rebrand, you can gain a ton with user research - by spending time watching and learning how your users use the product. You’d be surprised and then wonder why they aren’t doing what I expected them to do.
You can improve the experience of your existing users and you can make it very easy for new users to get started and figure out what they want. With companies, everything should be treated as a hypothesis where you continue to experiment. You want to build, measure and learn those things, and UI/UX can help.
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UI/UX is a crucial factor in the growth of any company. It’s a way to build better products that people will love.
In case you need the UI/UX of your company or product teams to stand out, message us. We can help.
