How does good UX lead to greater customer engagement?
Customer engagement – forging a connection with customers by providing value at each touchpoint – is one of the best ways to attract and retain a loyal customer base. Digital products, such as websites, platforms or apps, offer the potential of closer customer engagement but… it all depends on the design of the user experience. In fact, your product’s UX plays a critical role in how your customers perceive you and your brand (and consequently, whether they trust you enough to give you their data and… money). This article looks at how UX influences customer engagement and how you can leverage that connection to achieve your business goals.
Table of contents
The key principles of effective UX design for customer engagement
Taken broadly, user-centric design includes any and all factors that impact how the user interacts with the digital product; including its appearance, user interface, features and functionality. The fundamental principles are:
- Simplicity and usability – your app or website should be intuitive to use and seamlessly functional. Page load delays, unclear content or complicated user journeys will all negatively affect the user experience.
- Personalization and user-centric approach – In UX design, the user is at the heart of the process. Does the design address user pain points, solve their problems, and make it all feel easy? Ideally, yes. Another aspect of user-centric design is personalizing the user experience – either by location/geography, according to the shared motivations or interests of identified user groups, or even the tastes of the individual (such as recommendations based on a user’s browsing history).
- Consistency in design across various platforms – Consistency results in familiarity, and familiarity results in a comfortable (and easier) user experience. A key driver of design consistency is to implement a design system, a combined toolkit/template that ensures a uniform brand image for your digital products and cuts down on design and development time (thus keeping costs down).
Good UX design leads to strong user retention through positive experiences, customer satisfaction by efficiently meeting user needs, and gives your business a competitive advantage as it stands out from rivals with superior service quality.
How to improve UX for better user engagements?
If the goal of UX design is to create a digital product that is easy and enjoyable (and effective!) to use, resulting in better customer engagement, what are the essential techniques or activities to achieve that?
- User research – If the end users are the focus of your design activity, first you must know your users. Getting to know their needs, wants, pain points, values, even lifestyles is essential to ensuring that your design solves user problems. A key element of this user research is the development of user personas, fictional representations of the person or persons you are designing the experience for. User personas can be used to clearly define who your ideal users are, their current behaviors, their needs and goals, and the issues and pain points they are looking for help with. If you need inspiration, take a look at Nike’s website and their other digital spaces - nobody should have a problem ‘reading’ their main persona characteristics.
- User feedback loops – Personas are not enough; the key is to engage with your users, to involve them in gathering information that will inform your UX design. Part of this is establishing feedback loops and mechanisms that channel user input to your product team. It’s important to set up feedback as an ongoing activity. Users (and user needs) change over time, and so does your product; even after you’ve achieved product-market fit and scaled your product to address a wider audience, you still need user input to maintain (and where necessary, update) the product. If you want to learn how we use feedback from our users, read the YOUCAT Daily App case study, where we highlight some methods and results of implementing users’ feedback.
- Prototyping – Prototyping involves creating a clickable design and placing it in users’ hands to determine if the feature aligns with their thinking. This approach can yield both quantitative and qualitative feedback and is more cost-effective than adding the improvement or feature directly to the existing product version.
- Usability testing – Based on getting real people to use a real version of your product, usability testing is one of the best ways to include the user perspective in your UX design. Whichever type of usability testing you employ – lab usability testing, observations, remote usability testing, card sorting, A/B testing, hallway testing, or a straightforward phone interview - it can help you fix problems early when developing new products and, in the case of well-established products, identify flaws or fine-tune upgrades or new features.
- Analytical tools – Gain valuable insights from existing products using tools like Google Analytics, which provides quantitative data to help identify pages with higher bounce rates, for example. Additionally, tools like HotJar or Clarity offer heatmaps and screen recordings to track users’ behavior.
Aside from the practical aspects of testing product functionality, only engaging directly with users will tell you how they feel about the product. And that’s why we always encourage Product Owners to consider working closely with the users and actively involve them in regular communication.
Measuring the impact of UX on customer engagement
So, the question now is: how will using all these methods and tools help with better customer engagement? If the goal of your user experience is to boost engagement through user-centered design, increased satisfaction, positive brand impressions, and increased customer-product interaction, how do you know whether you’re achieving your goal?
The answer is measurement – identify the activities or results that indicate success and then establish UX metrics that measure them. The following are some of the most common metrics for measuring the impact of UX on customer engagement.
- Conversion rate – the percentage of users that complete a particular action (it may be a purchase, or submitting their email address to your website, or opting for the paid version of the digital product, and so on, depending on the action you focus on).
- Net promoter score – this is a satisfaction indicator of how likely your users are to recommend your product to other people.
- Bounce rate – if users leave your website on arrival, it’s referred to as ‘bouncing’; the bounce rate is an established test of the first impression a website makes. A bounce rate of no more than 40% – depending on your brand and industry – is a reasonable goal.
- Customer satisfaction scores – At key points of the user experience you can ask what customers think and feel about their experience so far (usually a simple rating on a scale of 1 to 10).
- Time to value – The time to value is how long it takes a customer to recognize the value they get from using your product; a short time to value results in a boost to conversions and customer retention.
- Customer lifetime value – A comparison of revenue with predicted customer lifespan, this indicates the monetary value of a user during their relationship with your product.
A great user experience leads to better customer engagement
Good UX design has always focused on the user – there has always been a link between the experience of using a digital product and a business’s wider customer engagement. The user experience goes beyond promises and persuasion, it is real, a practical and (in this digital era) fundamental aspect of the engagement itself. Your product’s UX can turn a user into a super fan, or it can send them running straight towards the competition. A great user experience, designed with user input and feedback, will engage customers and bring them back for more in a way that will show up in your engagement and UX metrics and your bottom line.
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