It has reaped numerous benefits for different businesses, from reducing time spent working with manual processes to improving a web visitor’s site experience. However, UX professionals are continually tasked with quantifying just how much a company can earn as a direct result of UX.
It can be tricky, but showing just how much user-centred design processes can contribute to a business’s profits is entirely possible and beneficial even!
To measure UX activities’ impact on business outcomes and ROI, professionals need to start with the right metrics. Deciding what metric you’re going to rely on for your specific project or application will indicate how successful your UX was. Some measures can include increases in conversion rates and page views and decreases in calls for assistance, user’s time spent accomplishing a task, and user errors.
Depending on your needs, you can define UX success based on measuring customer solutions or internal systems. Measures of success for this kind of process optimisation can be related to higher earnings, user behaviour, and the time and resources saved for the business.
Calculating your gains from UX can be done by subtracting how much was spent on the investment from the total economic growth. However, don’t forget to account for inflation and how much time it will take to pay off the investment. Money can be earned from increasing productivity, conversion rates, and other benefits that UX can bring to the table.
Imagine a scenario where UX is implemented in a company’s internal service system to reduce difficulty and time spent for end-users, employees in Customer Service and Sales. In the original setup, customer service agents had to sift through nine separate systems in order to answer the customer’s query. UX could solve any delays in servicing customers by consolidating the information from nine databases and creating one source for representatives to refer to.
Given this scenario, taking the number of users, their work hours, and the average annual salary will give you a picture of how each customer service representative’s time is worth. Calculating how much time is saved with the new user-centred design will then reflect the difference and identify how much was gained by the business.
In some situations, the argument on ROI will be more critical. This is especially true in instances where the existing UX causes such significant problems that it requires immediate attention. The end user’s needs then overlap with the business aspect for which ROI can justify the need for UX.
There are also new business opportunities to be found when UX is used to address end-users’ concerns, leading to more earnings overall.
With the right goals and measures in mind, UX can clearly be made to contribute to a business’s growth and ROI, especially where time, money, and productivity are concerned. Companies need to understand what they want to get out of UX and how these reductions in time and effort will directly translate into financial savings and potential gains. By starting with the end user’s paint points, there’s much to be gained for the business as a whole.
Here at Fabric Group, we use our experience as a custom software development company to design, analyse, and provide quality automation for businesses through custom digital platforms. Sign up with us today for a delivery assessment workshop to highlight opportunities for your business!
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