Why UI and UX matter for every company

In 2009, a major eCommerce company changed its "Register" button to a "Continue" button and increased its annual revenue to $300 Million. People call it the $300 Million Button, and it shows how much UI/UX can matter.

UI/UX is how a user interacts with and experiences your product or software. Psychologists have concluded that good design and development work can 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%. Mobile apps are no different. Mobile app uninstallation rates have increased by 80-85%, and a dull UI/UX is one of the reasons people uninstall an app. If a few clicks through the screens and interface don't impress the user, it won't take long before they uninstall it.

Canva is a startup that did well because of its UI/UX. It launched in August 2013 and now has 55 million monthly active users across 190 countries. Canva's team wanted an intuitive, user-friendly graphic design program, and they also wanted people who weren't graphic designers to believe they could design. Their UI and UX make it easy for non-designers to create and edit designs, and that is how Canva expanded so fast into international markets.

We help build companies, so we asked Dave Overton, our Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Pantinople, our Chief Design Officer, why UI/UX matters in a company.

Our CDO Dan and our CEO Dave

In your own words, what defines UI/UX?

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.

Why is UI/UX important for any product or software?

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.

How can UI/UX make a difference for companies?

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.

What would you tell companies that aren't investing in UI/UX yet?

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.

If you want the UI/UX of your company or product team to stand out, message us.