UX/UI ROI: discovering value
UX/UI is one of the secrets that has helped big tech launch and improve successful products and transform industries over the last 30 years. The examples are abundant, just to mention one is the playful Duolingo app recently announced at the Super Bowl. That platform went from an initially simple boring language learning app to a gamificated interface, immediately triggering its popularity. All that ingenuity came from product designers as well as UX/UI designers who analyzed carefully user behavior, pain points, desires, and more.
Q: But how come with infinite successful cases as that one there is still some resistance to adopting or externally hiring UX/UI into the team?
A: I asked different managers, and their basic answer is that clients are having a hard time seeing how a UX/UI contractor will generate economic value, and how to calculate the return on that investment (ROI).
For me, that’s a legitimate concern, I thought users satisfaction was enough, but then realized it’s also important to express in tangible numbers how engagement, retention, downloads, and comments are translated to actual economic value.
Metrics to calculate ROI:
The formula of Return on investment is ROI = Net income / Cost of investment x 100.
That can be your starting point for how the business has been transformed by applying CX/UX/UI techniques. But more metrics can be added to solidify your case.
In the following example, we measure the sessions of a website and user conversions:
We have a good traffic of 2,350 sessions in one month coming mainly from marketing campaigns, but the conversion is critically low, users are spending almost 3s on each session, but just 0.2% get to be MQLs. And finally, mobile use is 70% lower than the website.
Data shows they are confused about where to click and are spending too much time filling the forms and abandoning them without completing them, also the CTA is far from the form, and it doesn’t work on mobiles.
For starters, the previous example is not saying the website doesn’t work in terms of development or coding, it is actually saying the website is not reaching the market goals. It uses metrics such as conversion rate, session duration, and traffic measure and they compare that both on the web and mobile, typically UX/UI designers refer to these metrics as loyalty, pain points, usability, and so on.
I presented you that example from a marketing perspective, but the same can be done from any angle using other metrics and determine even how color is affecting user decision making. There you have some more metrics you can consider:
- Conversion rate
- Dropoff rate
- User Satisfaction
- Retention Rate
- Support calls
- Developers waste (Deficiency)
- Brand perception
To track these metrics there are different tools can be applied such as user behavior tracker, analytics tools, interviews and surveys, and so on.
Data on UX investing
- For every dollar invested in UX there’s is a $100 dollars in return
- Brands report a 66% increase in premium membership when experience is exceptional
- The number of projects abandoned because they do not meet the original purpose is up to 15%, which equates to $150 billion worldwide.
- The time developers spend reworking a project with avoidable faults is 50%.
- The cost of fixing an error after development is 100X that of fixing it before development.
- Three out of the twelve reasons projects fail are attributed to user experience failures.
- All the above data validates the need to focus on UX and strategic business analysis before building a product.
https://www.eficode.com/blog/achieving-roi-with-ux-design
https://www.forrester.com/report/The-Six-Steps-For-Justifying-Better-UX/RES117708
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roi-ux-power-carefully-considered-user-experience-door3/
https://s3.amazonaws.com/coach-courses-us/public/theuxschool/uploads/The_Trillion_Dollar_UX_Problem.pdf
https://uxplanet.org/roi-and-ux-how-to-measure-it-32f57325f971
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/roi-of-ux-convince-executives
https://www.nngroup.com/courses/measuring-ux/
