Successfully Balancing UX With Business Goals (7 Smart Tips)
Balancing your clients’ user experience (UX) with your business goals ensures long-term success and business sustainability. Businesses can better create products and services that meet customer needs by prioritizing UX, thereby increasing satisfaction and loyalty.
An expert San Diego UX design agency shares tips you need to know to balance UX with your business goals:
- Create clear business goals.
- Follow a user-centered design.
- Implement accessibility.
- Make data-informed decisions.
- Test and iterate.
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1. Create Clear Business Goals
Knowing precisely what you want to achieve with your business makes balancing UX and organizational objectives easier.
For example, a financial services company wants to improve the UX of its mobile banking app. They established clear and measurable business goals, including increasing mobile app user engagement by 20%, reducing user support requests related to usability by 30% and achieving a minimum 4.5-star rating on app stores with positive reviews from 80% of users.
The company also aims to increase cross-selling and upselling opportunities by 15% within two quarters. To measure progress, key performance indicators (KPIs) have been identified, including user engagement rates, customer support ticket reduction, app store ratings, onboarding completion time, and cross-selling and upselling conversion rates.
These clear goals and KPIs provide a structured approach to driving UX improvements, customer satisfaction, and business growth through the mobile banking app. Here are techniques to systematically create clear business goals:
- Make goals specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART). Instead of "improve user experience," use metrics such as "increase customer satisfaction ratings by 10%" or "reduce customer support response time by 20%."
- Understand user needs, pain points, and preferences by considering the user’s journey with your business from their perspective, wants, and hopes.
- Look for overlap or potential conflicts between business goals and UX.
- Maintain long-term viability and growth while supporting and improving the UX.
2. Follow a User-Centered Design
A website with a user-centered design focuses on users and their needs in every part of the design process. By adopting this approach to site design, businesses can ensure a balance between UX and business goals.
A sporting goods company focused on increasing online sales adopts a UX-centered design approach. They implement personalized product recommendations, streamline the checkout process, and optimize their website for mobile and performance to enhance the user experience.
Because of these UX-centric efforts, the company reduced cart abandonment rates, increased sales, and improved customer loyalty. Here are some web development tips for a user-centered design:
- Use interviews, surveys, and usability testing to understand the target audience's needs, behaviors, and preferences.
- Create user personas with key user characteristics, goals, and pain points to represent target audience segments.
- Establish key UX metrics—user satisfaction, task completion rates, conversion rates, or time spent on specific actions—that support business goals.
- Create prototypes or mockups and test them to improve the UX.
- Involve UX designers, developers, product managers, and stakeholders in the design process to ensure business goals are considered and integrated into UX decisions.
- Monitor user feedback, conduct usability tests, and analyze user behavior data to determine how UX improvements affect metrics.
- Conduct user behavior analysis regularly, especially before and after campaigns, to ensure UX balances with business goals.
3. Implement User Accessibility
A critical part of investing in excellent web design is implementing web accessibility, or making websites, tools, and technologies usable by people with disabilities. This inclusive approach improves usability and UX and helps to ensure that you meet your business goals.
For instance, a San Diego eye care clinic website has hyperlinks that stand out to help the colorblind find them easily. They have appropriate texts with their links, so users know where the links lead them. Their site uses high-contrast fonts and has zoom capabilities to help their patients access content and site features.
Here are steps to effectively incorporate accessibility into web design:
- Understand accessibility guidelines, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to provide a framework for making digital content accessible. Keep updated on any changes in WCAG and other accessibility regulations.
- Conduct regular accessibility audits of digital products and platforms using automated tools and manual testing techniques.
- Involve users with disabilities and seek their feedback on the accessibility of your web designs.
- Use inclusive design principles in the UX process to ensure adaptable designs that meet user needs, such as resizable text, video captioning, and clear navigation.
4. Make Data-Informed Decisions
Making data-informed decisions allows businesses to align user needs with their strategic objectives. By analyzing user behavior and feedback, companies can identify pain points, optimize user flows, and improve overall satisfaction.
This approach maximizes the chances of achieving both a positive UX and your desired business outcomes. Check out these tips to implement data-informed decisions:
- Align UX and business goals with key performance indicators such as user engagement, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and revenue.
- Collect data using analytics tools, user feedback surveys, and usability testing.
- Analyze historical trends and performance to establish baseline data, then compare current data to baselines to determine how UX changes affect metrics.
- Compare design or UX changes using A/B or multivariate testing.
- Use usability tests, user feedback, and performance data to evaluate UX improvements.
5. Test and Iterate Your Website
Testing and iterating your website is crucial to balancing UX and business goals. It starts with defining the specific testing objectives and ensuring they align with UX and business goals.
For example, a San Diego real estate company wants to improve conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, or enhance user engagement. Web designers clearly outline the company’s desired outcomes and metrics to measure during the testing process.
Once the testing objectives, results, and metrics are straightforward, web designers follow these testing strategies:
- Based on business goals and resources, choose testing methods (e.g., usability testing, A/B testing, heat mapping, and eye-tracking).
- Develop realistic and relevant test scenarios that simulate user interactions with the website, covering a variety of user personas and use cases.
- Recruit a diverse group of test participants representing the target audience in age, gender, and technology familiarity.
- Conduct tests, collect quantitative and qualitative data, observe participant behavior, and encourage open feedback.
- Collect data on usability issues, user satisfaction, task completion rates, and other relevant metrics.
- Analyze testing data for patterns, trends, and areas for improvement to bridge UX and business goals.
- Focus on solutions with the greatest potential to improve UX and align with business goals.
- Monitor the website's performance after making changes, measuring the impact on the defined metrics and assessing whether the desired UX enhancements affect business goals. Use analytics tools and user feedback to evaluate the iterations' effectiveness.
- Test and iterate a website regularly to find new ways to improve it.
Summing Up
Effectively balancing UX with business goals improves customer engagement, satisfaction, sales, and loyalty. Expert web designers, such as a San Diego UX design agency, create clear business goals, follow a user-centered design, implement accessibility, make data-informed decisions, and test and iterate websites.
Learn how an excellent website design can promote balance between the UX and company goals. There’s no time to waste! Call Digital Authority Partners (DAP) now.
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