Why User Experience Design matters in the Success of Contemporary Businesses?

The success of products and services and the growth of businesses in the contemporary digital-driven market are inextricably interwoven with the experiences enterprises offer to their customers. It is true that emerging technologies have unprecedentedly transformed businesses at scale, but building responsive UIs (User Interfaces) and robust APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are not the only things that digital practices do. The user experience design unequivocally plays an incremental role in keeping the tech-savvy customers content.

The digital-born customers demand omnichannel experiences, seamless navigation, ease of operation, and a feel-good factor when interacting with diverse user interfaces. User Experience Design is far more different from all these factors. The UX design determines the value for customers and sets the parameters for their satisfaction by augmenting experiences holistically.

UX is More Than Improving the Look and Feel of the UI

While creating digital experiences, it is not only the user interfaces that build the brand image of businesses, the liability is equally shouldered by the user experience design. Therefore, prior to innovating products and services, it is important to analyze what customers want; how they behave; what features can hold their interest; and encourage them to come back again and again.

The UX design converges business, customers, and technologies to help organizations develop products after understanding the demands of the end-users. The uniqueness and success of products and services don't just lie around the design. Had this been true, the copy/paste model of hundreds of Paytm or Ola like services would have been an overnight hit. It is necessary to understand what exactly goes behind the scene in creating a world-class product. There is always something niche or a unique business model which will make your product a success.

UX Design Approach Based on Real-Life Challenges and Experiences

In my series of blogs, I will go through the journey of transforming user experiences for our client, a leading financial solutions provider. We will learn from some of the real-life challenges and address certain "service industry-based” concerns.

The series will be divided in the following five parts with respect to specific scenarios:

1. Customer Experience and Requirement Gathering
2. Revisiting UX for the Digital-Age Customers 
3. When Experiences are Evolved to Become Designs
4. Myths Around UX in the FinTech Industry
5. Good Services are Verbs, Bad Services are Nouns  

UX: Benefits and Goals

Today customers want secure, personalized, and easily available financial services. There is indeed a paradigm shift from physical to virtual, but as far as winning the trust of customers, at least in financial matters, are concerned, companies still have a long way to go. With an enriched user experience design, businesses can potentially shorten their journey to winning customer’s trust and loyalty.

Therefore, besides improving the look and feel of the interfaces that customers use, financial solutions providers must mull over implementing measures to enrich user experience. Reports suggest that approximately 52% of users are more likely to avoid engagement with businesses if they go through a bummer while using the user-interfaces. Therefore, it is important to know about the benefits and goals of UX design.

Goals of User Experience Design

• Increasing engagement, boosting sales, and accelerating the overall growth of businesses by providing enriched user experiences
• Understanding the context-of-use, (i.e., what products and services a customer is looking for; what is the interface being used, and at what time) and designing and developing products, apps, or services making optimum use of business resources, people, and technology 
• Ensuring that businesses cater to the needs and expectations of the end users

Benefits of User Experience Design

• Boosts customer satisfaction and encourages the users to visit again
• Increases the adoption of products and services, improving sales
• Helps in effective brand positioning, increasing customer outreach
• Aligning User Objectives with Business Goals is the Real Challenge  

Aligning User Objectives with Business Goals is the Real Challenge

User-objectives can be diverse and aligning them with the business goals is not a cakewalk. Our team consisting of expert UX designers find ways to map customer’s objectives with the organizational goals, which is not just difficult but also different in context to FinTech (Financial Technologies). The major constraint is to develop an understanding of the users coming on to your platform to achieve different objectives. For instance, if a user’s objective is to buy a mutual fund for his or her kid's education, then the business goal should be to make the customer’s purchase of mutual fund trustworthy, transparent, usable, and delightful.

Let’s summarize:

• If the user’s goal is accomplished then it means that they had a great experience with the product. In that case, it is easier and quicker for them to find what they are looking for.
• When a user has an unforgettable experience, they are more likely to buy or revisit a product, besides recommending the same to their friends.
• When users are satisfied with the experience, they are more likely to be loyal. These factors essentially help increase customer outreach as well as traffic and conversion rate.
• With this, let's begin our journey to learn about the challenges and opportunities along with creating UX design.

Preview: Customer Experience and Requirement Gathering

Kim Goodwin once said that requirements can’t be “gathered.” It indeed makes sense because requirements are not a by-product, they’re not grown on a tree at the client's place or in a boardroom, for someone to come by and pick. Nothing exists until there is a collaboration that happens between different stakeholders of the project — the client, the technology team, the UX and UI designers, marketing and sales, and more.

At the end of the day, all you are really doing is—negotiating on the requirements …