How UX can add value to your business and your customers

User experience (UX) is an expansive field that impacts every business in the world.

That may sound dramatic, but every business has users of some kind.

Customers, clients, subscribers, readers, and even your team of writers, editors, and content managers experience how your website works so it’s important to get it right.

Every interaction people have with your business impacts their user experience.

Invest in your user experience and you’re investing in the success of your business. Research by Forrester found that every dollar invested in UX returned $100. That’s a staggering 9,900% return on investment.

So, how can UX add value to your business and your customers?

In this article, I’ll be sharing what a UX agency does and how we, as a UX agency, drive growth for our clients.

We are a UX agency that specialises in Jamstack

Here at Skyward Digital, we are a UX agency that specialises in Jamstack.

As a UX agency, everything we do is focused on making your user experience more effective in order to drive the online growth of your business. The way we do this depends exactly on what areas of your UX need improvement.

It means each and every project we work on is unique — which is pretty awesome!

Take a look at how we improved UX to help this SaaS client increase signups by 61% and win $150K more investment in their product.

What does a UX agency do?

If you’re still wondering what on earth a UX agency is, then let me help:

UX design focuses on the way users interact with your products and services. In UX design, we want to make sure your users have the best possible experience.

When it comes to user experience, we like to get deep.

UX design carefully balances aspects of psychology, design, development and research — all of which let us really analyse your performance and make informed decisions to improve the user experience.

Essentially, we get into the heads of your customers and make sure your design is created with them in mind.

Why?

Because user experience is key to success.

UX runs through everything you do as a brand. From your website build and navigation to customer service, user experience needs to be a priority throughout your business.

The impact of bad UX

Every interaction your user has with your business has the opportunity to make or break your relationship with them.

If your website has bad user experience, it’s going to cause friction and frustration. Website visitors will lose trust in your brand and will most likely jump ship and take their custom elsewhere. Bad UX is basically like handing your customers straight over to your competitors.

Good UX, however, lets your customers easily interact with your site and find what they are looking for. It removes friction from the process so they can easily achieve what they set out to do.

It’s simple. Good UX = happier users. And happier users = better performance.

Let me give you an example:

I recently tried buying some running shoes from an online retailer. I browsed their category pages and stumbled upon what looked like the perfect trainers. So, I clicked on the image to go to the product page. Only, when I got to the product page, the shoes were out of stock in every single size.

So, I clicked on another product. And guess what? They were also out of stock.

Eventually, I gave up and took my money elsewhere. I bought a pair of shoes from another brand.

A simple solution to help reduce my frustrations would be to have added a little “out of stock” notification to the category page so I knew what I could buy without having to click in and out of every product. If I still wanted to buy the out of stock runners, a simple email signup to let me know when they were back in stock would have been the perfect way to keep me as a happy customer. With UX, even the small changes can make a huge difference on your website.

But nope. This retailer didn’t do either of these things.

Investing in user experience could have prevented this brand from losing a customer.

5 ways UX can add value to your business

If you want to add greater value to your business for your team and your customers, you need to prioritise user experience.

Whether your business is one-day old or 100-years old, user experience should always be a top priority. Yet, as your business grows and the need to develop new features expands, UX can fall down that list of priorities.

But it’s time to put UX back to the top of your priority list and here are the reasons why.

Investing in UX adds value to your business through:

• Happier users

• More conversions

• Friction-free user journeys

• Increased innovation

• Improved consistency

When every step of your business has been created with your users in mind, the outcome is simple. Your users will be happier. And because they’re happier, they’ll be more likely to convert (and quicker too)!

Investing in UX means the user journey is an enjoyable route from A to B — whatever B may look like for that particular user. There’s no frustrating dead-ends, messy u-turns or confusing roundabouts. It’s just a friction-free experience as they navigate their way around your site, and your wider business.

Innovation is key to the long-term success of any business. Even the biggest and best of businesses can’t just rest on their laurels and expect the sales to keep rolling in. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game. UX let’s you do just that. With UX, you can generate a strong feedback loop between what your team is working on and what your users actually want and need. This real-time feedback is invaluable for making sure your business is always on step ahead.

Along with innovation, UX also brings consistency. Your users will grow to recognise your brand for its consistent style and functionality. As UX helps strengthen your brand processes and workflows, it brings a familiar consistency that your users will trust and love.

Investing in user experience will mean happier website visitors and, in turn, more sales.

But, it also impacts users on the other side of your business. I’m talking about the editors, content managers, developers… and everyone else who helps keep your website up and running.

When you invest in UX, your content managers and editors can easily and quickly make changes to your website content. This frees up development resources, is less disruptive when making large-scale changes, and can positively impact SEO. Not to mention, it reduces friction and frustration within your team.

By prioritising UX on the backend of your website, your developers will be able to easily make changes to code and test those changes. Better yet, there will be fewer chances of things breaking due to poor UX and clunky, outdated systems. It’ll also be easier to onboard new team members when the website is ready to grow thanks to a shallower learning curve and easier-to-use systems.

User experience applies to every aspect of your business.

How we use UX to drive growth for our clients

As a UX agency, everything we do is done with user experience in mind. And I mean everything.

We can help your business with:

• Project planning & consulting

• Website audits

• Content strategy

• UX/UI design

• Jamstack development

• Analytics reporting

Whatever your business plans might be, we are on hand to help you achieve new heights of business success.

Project planning & consulting

Your project plan is crucial to your survival. It sounds drastic, I know. But I’m being serious.

Without a strategic project plan in place, you run the risk of wasting time and money while building a website that yields poor results and frustrates customers.

At Skyward Digital, we can optimise your project plan and improve your business strategy.

Combining our expertise in digital marketing, user experience and Jamstack technologies, we’ll help you understand how to take advantage of your market and set your business up for success.

An optimised project plan will save your business time and money by reducing bottlenecks in the process and improving the workflow. It can also minimise friction and reduce the number of rollbacks by creating a simplified workflow that provides a clear changelog and scope of work.

Website audits

Understanding the roadblocks on your website is key for improving UX and, in turn, making sure your website visitors convert.

As UX and Jamstack specialists, we know how to find the things that are holding you back from achieving online success.

We can conduct a website audit that helps you identify any problems with your site and provide a clear path to solving them. We’ll even tell you the priority order of which solutions will have the biggest impact on your website performance.

This website audit will then let you really understand and improve your:

• User experience

• Editor experience

• Content

• Marketing goals

• Design

All in all, your website audit helps you fix core issues on your website — issues that you may not even be aware of.

The end result? Happier users, of course!

Content strategy

Regardless of what you offer, your website needs strong content.

The content on your website helps you connect with new audiences, demonstrate the value of your brand and build stronger connections with existing customers.

Your content strategy also feeds into UX by appealing to, and helping, your audience at various stages of their buying journey.

We will build an actionable content strategy that outlines the on-site content you need to publish in order to reach your target audience.

Having a strong content strategy can:

• Drive more traffic to your website;

• increase audience engagement and loyalty;

• showcase the benefits of your brand, not just the features;

• widen your reach by distributing content across various platforms;

• Increase conversions by creating goal-driven content;

• and strengthen connections with your target audience.

The benefits of an optimised content strategy are undeniable.

UX/UI design

Creating designs that put your users first means you can ensure your customers have the best experience from the very first interaction. Making sure your website is both functional and pretty, we’ll develop a beautiful UI (user interface) that makes your brand really stand out.

When it comes to UX/UI design, everything we do is led by data from real users. We’ll then use this data and user insights to create designs based on your users needs and behaviours.

We’re also big on making sure your website is usable for your team. That’s why we use Figma to make sure your website is easy to use and edit. Our dynamic designs also feature reusable components so you can easily create new layouts.

After all, websites that look great and work amazingly are websites that have users leaving happy and coming back for more.

Jamstack development

Jamstack is the new way of building websites that are future-proof, flexible and geared towards success.

Whether you’re looking for a website for marketing, SaaS or ecommerce, we can help you develop a Jamstack website that prioritises your business growth.

Offering faster performance, built-in security and unlimited scalability, there are a lot of benefits to switching to Jamstack.

When you choose to build a Jamstack website, you choose:

• Better performance

• Watertight security

• Cheaper running costs

• Improved experience

• Infinite scalability

Across the board, it offers an improved experience for your users, your editors and your developers.

Analytics reporting

Having a website is all well and good. But, do you know how your website is performing?

Analytics reporting lets you get a clear picture of how your website is really doing.

We can help you set up your analytics software so that you can see how users interact with your site, which pages perform best and where you need to make improvements.

This analytics reporting takes guesswork out of your website performance by letting you see exactly what is (and what isn’t) working on your site.

Analytics data offers an insight into your users minds. You can then use this information to make strategic changes to improve the UX of your site going forward.

With analytics reporting, you can learn how users navigate your site and identify the weak spots in these website user journeys. You can even tap into new content and business opportunities by listening to your users search behaviour and figuring out what they need help with most.

Using all of this data, you can focus your efforts on improving the things that really matter.

Achieving business growth by putting users first

If you want to achieve business growth, you have to put your users first.

User experience is at the core of everything we do at Skyward.

This laser-focus on user experience means we can help your business develop solutions that make your users happier. And we all know that happier customers = greater business success.

If you want to learn more about our UX approach and the ways we can help your business, contact our friendly team to book a free consultation.