Even though, more and more people are exposed to the term UX design these days, I am still shocked to observe that more than half of the people I talk to don’t understand the importance of user experience. After explaining the benefits over and over again, I realized that there is a pattern – people don’t understand why it is critical to provide great experience to users, regardless if your users are the customers or employees. Sometimes, a person may realize the customer side, but needs more explanation about their own staff, which also has significant impact on the business, just from the other side (more on that later).
The primary benefit is improving the satisfaction level, so people could enjoy using it, no matter what “problems” you are trying to solve. I will tell you this: if you already have a product or planning to build one, you’d better think how to make your users happy with it. Let me explain you what I think and what is the current trend. We live in the 21st century and the technical progress is so darn fast, that it’s impossible to create such a valuable and unique product (web-service, mobile application, etc.), that nobody will be able to create a clone or at least very similar competitor. So if you have an interesting product with a so-so user experience, as a matter of fact, a bunch of clones will be released right away, but chances are – somebody will provide a better user experience and they will win your customers, because you think that UX design is not that important. You have to understand, that today, there are so many amazing designers, developers, engineers and other pros, so your brilliant idea can be easily stolen used as inspiration for a competitor’s product with a greater user experience. And it is highly likely that users will prefer a product, which was created with thinking about end-users and what THEY need. This is one of the most important keys to success today.
Here, I will be collecting the links to articles, studies and other evidence that shows the importance of UX design (in no particular order):