3 Essential UX Design Techniques To Improve Your Customer Experience

When User Experience (UX) improves customer experience (CX), it can also significantly increase a company’s ROI, as good UX investments enhance customer satisfaction. In time, satisfied customers become loyal, which is vital to a company’s success and is its very reason for existing. 

In this article, we talk about our top 3 UX design techniques you can implement with your team to improve your customer experience like a pro!

What Is UX Design?

Before we dig in, let’s recap what User Experience (UX) is to eliminate any confusion. Website UX is all about digital product usability, whereas Customer Experience (CX) is about how your customers feel throughout the customer journey. 

To find out more, check out our article on CX vs UX: What’s the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience?

And now, let’s see what does UX mean in web design. UX design refers to the user’s journey when interacting with a product or service. It’s the process design teams use to create products or services that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. It involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.

In other words, UX design can also be seen as a “school of design” that transfers to virtually every facet of any digital product, whether front-end websites, mobile apps, or general software. Anything that is ‘used’ by someone in the digital space can benefit from good UX design techniques. 

So the concept is simple: design your product or service and its interface in a way that prioritises user experience. However, consider that UX design thinking posits that the process is never really ‘done’. It’s an iterative journey that aims to gather insight into how users interact and improve that on a constant basis.

Why You Need A Good UX Design Strategy

Investing in first-class UX design is crucial when trying to create a top digital product or service and build a successful digital business. Although the concept of UX design has been around for a while now, many potential clients still ask us, “why is UX design so important for our business success?”

To help answer this question, we’ve outlined 5 of the most important benefits your business can get from investing in UX design straight from the beginning of your digital product or service cycle.

1. Providing a better solution for customers

A very important thing to remember is that users fall in love with experiences, not the technology behind them.

Good UX design is the result of UX research (or, as we like to call it, Biometric UX Testing), information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, and the implementation of all these elements in your solution. 

Normally, a UX design agency like us does more than make your solution look good on the surface. Instead, it reorganises your ideas and resources to meet the exact needs of your end users!

2. Increased customer loyalty & retention

The better the UX design you create for your users, the happier and more satisfied they’ll be. 

However, on the other side, if you don’t live up to their expectations, they’ll become frustrated and disappointed, which could even lead to them avoiding using your services or products in the future. 

But customers who are satisfied with your products or services are likely to stay loyal and might even make recommendations or share positive reviews and testimonials, which could greatly influence their network.

3. Reduced customer service needs

The more intuitive a system’s UX design is, the less time it’ll take for users to learn the digital product’s or service’s functions and features. As a result, they’re less likely to waste their valuable time reading and trying to understand a user manual.

In turn, this will also enable your business to reduce customer service costs, as fewer users call for clarification or instructions on using your digital product or service – it’s a win-win situation!

4. Increased revenue

When you offer customers a user experience that is simple and accessible, you’ll start to attract more visitors who’ll spend more time using your website or mobile app. 

For example, if you have well-designed, easy-to-use navigation on your website, you can easily establish credibility, authority, and trust among potential customers.

The result – higher conversions and more revenue for your business!

Key ROI Areas That Can Improve With A Good UX Design

Moving on, did you know that when companies invest more in their UX design for their products, services and website, they can massively improve their ROI? 

Even better – the improvement can be seen in 5 key areas, which we explore further. 

1. Higher conversions – greater ease of use means better emotional attachment to your company, resulting in customer loyalty 
2. Higher customer & business-to-business satisfaction – because people love to be offered what they need and want (especially what they don’t know they need and want)
3. Higher development efficiency – due to reduced development waste which can save a lot of money
4. Lower support calls – because pre-empting the majority of user problems via UX design techniques 
5. Less risk of creating the wrong customer solution – again, here is where hardwired and evidence-based UX Research comes into play to find out the most usable and valuable things for your customers

3 UX Design Techniques To Improve Your Customer Experience & ROI

Let’s acknowledge this before moving further: we know that every business is trying to offer products and services to meet their customers’ wants and needs and satisfy them whilst providing an effective UX and CX. But what if you could do that in a faster and smarter way? 

And this leads us to the show’s stars – our top 3 essential UX design techniques that all marketers will discuss this year and beyond!

1. Create your perfect target persona & model various scenarios

You’ve likely heard of having a target audience, but what you might not know about are target personas. 

These are profiles of individuals in your target audience, created by research, knowledge of current/past customers and a little imagination. If you want to find out more, check out our blog on how to build your perfect target persona.

By creating different target personas, you can understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals much more clearly. This will help you to recognise that different people have different wants, needs and expectations and identify the users you’re designing your products and services for. 

A great idea is to model different critical scenarios, which we like to call “scenario-driven design”, which is all about understanding your customers on a deeper level. This implies that you can think about their wants, goals, experiences, context, needs, and desires and include all these fine details into a scenario you can then model. 

And the most exciting part is that once you’ve created these scenarios, you can then use them to build user stories, target personas, and even customer journey maps! In case you’ve missed it, we have a great article on what is a customer journey map and why do you need one packed with valuable information and tricks.

2. Biometric UX Testing

Testing is one of the best UX design techniques that you can use for evaluating a product or service, as you can test them on users to find out how easy your UX design is to navigate. 

Therefore, your chosen group of representative customers will yield powerful insights through their interactions with and reactions to your UX design. 

At Lnet Digital, we take things a little further with our UX Testing & Research service by combining Biometric Technology with Neuromarketing! This means that our customers can gain a better understanding of their customers’ emotions and behaviours from eye-tracking and facial expression tests run on their target personas in real-time.

This method of UX testing can supply valuable and direct knowledge about how real customers use the system in real-time as it involves observing them as they attempt to complete various digital tasks (which is often something a company repeatedly conducts, from early-stage development until their products or services are released). 

The main benefit and purpose of UX testing is to identify any potential usability problems with a design as early as possible, so they can be fixed before implementing or mass-producing the design. However, we always point out that if you want to achieve the best results possible from your customer behaviour testing, you should know how to run A/B testing techniques.  

Why? Because by doing so, you can easily improve registration numbers, newsletter sign-ups, and more. Pro-tip – to identify any barriers to user success in greater depth, combine analytics, AB testing, and user testing! 

3. Wireframing

Wireframing is the process of creating a basic layout of structural guidelines for your website, digital service or product layout. This can be done in many ways, with one of the most popular ones being simple paper sketches or more interactive digital mock-ups. 

Essentially, it is a way of designing a website at the structural level, and it’s most commonly used to layout the content and functionality on website pages which takes into account the user needs and their journeys. Wireframes are usually used early in the development process to establish the basic structure of a website page before any visual design and content are added. 

From our experience, one of the great advantages of wireframing is that it can provide an early visual that can be used to review with the client, whilst users can also review it as early feedback for future prototype usability tests. 

From a more practical perspective, wireframing ensures the page’s content and functionality are correctly positioned based on the user and business needs. And as the project moves forward, wireframes can also be used as great dialogue between various members of the project team to agree on the project vision and scope.

Final Thoughts

And as we’ve reached the end of our article, we’d like to answer one of our client’s most frequently asked questions – “when should I invest in UX?”. 

The simple answer is as early on as possible! As a rule of thumb, as Clare-Marie Karat, a principal UX consultant and former IBM researcher stated:

“A rule of thumb is for every pound invested in User Experience Research, you save £10 in development and £100 in post-release maintenance.”

We’d say it’s far less expensive to avoid designing a problematic product or service in the first place than to fix it later! So we hope that our top 3 essential UX design techniques will come in handy when creating your UX development process. As a good practice, we recommend integrating UX early in your product or service development cycle and testing your users’ experience and satisfaction time and again as you move forward.

If you want to discover how we can help you experience what your users see and feel about your products and services in real-time, don’t hesitate to contact us. During your FREE consultation, we can explain our Biometric UX Testing & Research service and find the best way for you and your business to get to know your customers better than ever so you can increase your Customer Experience & ROI in no time! 

You can call us on 0116 218 4000 or email us at [email protected], and one of our friendly and experienced team members will be happy to assist you!