UX Directly Impacts Your ROI
Here’s How
Given the current economic climate and double-dip recessions the world is experiencing as a result of the Coronavirus pandemics impact on business, posting an ROI is absolutely crucial for justifying any type of marketing activity, and indeed continued employment.
User Experience is critical to the success of online products and services, but is sometimes seen as a ‘nice to have’ by leadership. In this article, we’ll teach you how to demonstrate the return on investment of your User Experience initiatives to secure buy-in from business leadership and continue to enjoy a long and fruitful career.
Providing a positive return on investment is one thing, but how you report on it is another entirely, and User Experience Designers who are looking to rise through the ranks should be well informed and well-equipped to do so: finding a way to quantify and articulate the value you bring to an organisation is something many people struggle with.
The ROI of UX
Cost savings
Various research has demonstrated that it is far cheaper to fix issues in the design and testing stage of User Experience than to have to spend time doing this once you’ve gone live, to a factor of about ten to one: it’ll cost 1 dollar to fix in design, compared to 10 afterwards.
Similarly, this ensures your software engineers, UX designers and other team members involved don’t have to waste any valuable time in future, driving costs down even further.
Further Investment
This might seem like a no-brainer, but demonstrating early returns and “low hanging fruit” with your UX projects is a sure-fire way to secure increased and continued investment, which is why your primary goal from the start should be to ensure those gains.
Direct Impact on Revenue
Creating the best possible User Experience on your website — provided it is revenue-generating — can directly impact your organisation's bottom line in a number of ways:
- Increased sales: better UX means more people are likely to progress through the checkout process instead of dropping off due to confusion or difficulty, meaning more sales for you
- Improved customer retention: a good experience means your first-time customers are more likely to convert into loyal returning customers, driving up the lifetime value of a buyer
- Predictable results: once you’ve nailed your UX, you’ll be able to accurately predict and forecast the long-term benefits it brings to your business in cost and revenue terms
- Staff productivity and motivation: rather than wasting precious time that could be spent designing a killer User Experience telling your organisation about the importance of UX, instead you could show them your results, what you’ve learned from your tests, and how much money you’re making the business. This will have a knock-on effect for staff morale and productivity, providing further benefits.
When you focus on doing the above activities rather than sharing countless boring case studies of what other people have done, you’ll enjoy much more buy-in and continued investment from the business.
Metrics you can use:
Basic access to your organisations Google Analytics or other analytics accounts can furnish you with all the metrics you need to prove the value of your User Experience. You should track these metrics over time to show how they’ve improved over work done previously. Let’s take a look at some examples:
Bounce Rate: if you’re suffering from a high bounce rate, that’s a certain indicator of a bad UX and you should look to remedy this straight away. Ideally, you could show the drop in the amount of visitors bouncing off your site each time you implement a change to the UX.
Pages Visited: if your visitors are only visiting the checkout page and making their purchase, that might be a good thing, but typically you will want your visitors — whether they’re new or returning — to be visiting various pages on your site. This is especially important if you’re in ecommerce and offer multiple products.
New vs Returning Visits: whilst your Search Engine Optimisation team will be wanting a lot of new visits to the site, it is the UX team’s role to make sure these new visitors keep on coming back. If you can demonstrate that you’re capturing this audience and they are returning to you, it is a great sign of your success.
The All-Important Conversion Rate: hopefully you’ve got goal completions set up in your analytics so that you can easily track your conversion rates. This doesn’t just have to mean how many of your visitors are spending money on the site, but could also include:
- New newsletter signups
- Engagement with blogs via social signals or comments
- Contact us form completions
and more.
