According to Fortune.com, 90% of all start-ups fail and the biggest reason why they fail is a poor understanding of what the customer requires. In simple words, they do a bad job of examining users’ problems and behavior. As a result, most new products have low adoption as they do not give a persuasive case for why they are useful or meaningful. This is one of the reasons why startups should have a good UX design. A startup must consider user experience design from the first day, analyzing the target market’s pain points and designing a product that resonates reverberates with potential users.
Startups like Snapchat, Netflix, and Uber are successful not just because of their technology. The code that powers these platforms is quite simple to replicate. Instead, these companies have earned their user experience. They understand what customers want in terms of usability, speed, and convenience. Design, UX testing, and implementation is now the most significant aspect of creating a new startup. However, many new startups neglect the design process from the first day.
What is UX design?
UX stands for user experience, which refers to a person’s emotions and feelings about using a specific product, service, or system. It includes the experiential, practical, meaningful, effective, and valuable aspects of human and computer interaction as well as product ownership- which means it includes the offline and online experience of the customer with a product or brand.
How a Bad User Experience Design Can Kill a Startup?
For a tech startup, UX is one among the several things that must be considered, but when you identify that a good UX produces two of the most basic results that all startups focus on, it is simple to see why this has become such an important thing for a business. A good UX leads to fast conversation and extended customer retention. This is the reason why startups should have a good UX design.
Often, startups face the challenge of trying to get to grips with product design, but not being able to hire a full-time UX designer to create an intuitive, seamless, and user-friendly interface. Cost is one of the important factors here. What most of the startups fail to recognize is that the ROI in good user experience is worth its weight in gold and that a great UX design is imperative if you are trying to scale a product and grab the attention.
Compromising on the user experience design is something that every startup must focus on and avoid in every way. There are times when it is worth sacrificing other things to make sure you have the best user experience design.
How can we identify if it is a good design?
Ranging from landing pages to store shopping experiences- how do you identify if your design is good? Well, there are a couple of performance indicators that you can consider:
- Sales- Did the user experience design result in sales? A rise in sales is a good reflection of straightforward user experience.
- The accomplishment of the task- Did the customer finish the objective of the experience? (whether it is an application form submission, video watched, or points conversion)?
- Retention- Did the customer come back? A returning customer means a satisfied customer.
It is important to explain how you measure the success of the interaction design. By clearly defining an objective for it that can be turned to the Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
UX design and engineering for startups
As a founder of a startup, you have come with an idea that seems feasible. But how do you know if people want to pay for it?
Understanding the demand for a product or service is the biggest challenge of entrepreneurship. It is also where a good UX testing begins. The first important thing a good UX designer must do is discuss with potential audiences in the target market. By doing so, the designer will get an idea about the challenges faced by a customer. These insights are analyzed and distilled into an audience profile that outlines the requirements, demands, and fears that the audience has.
Creating a customer profile has become one of the standard practices in business schools and startups training sessions, but most of the time it is polished over. Most of the time, startups create customer profiles without talking to anyone. However, there is no substitute for doing the UX work of discussing with the real target customers. The things you learn will inform your products, benefits, features, and overall structure. In several cases, the product you had in mind is not the product that the customer is looking for.
Why Startups Should Have a Good UX Design
While building your product, everything comes down to your user experience design. From how you approach your customers at the initial stage to how their invoice is created, presenting your startup in the best possible way is important.
The methods used by UX designers are, essentially, the techniques most lean startups use including iterative learning, testing, and prototyping.
These techniques allow startups to find out what works before investing lots of money into manufacturing or developing the product or service. They use a huge amount of user data available and apply their new technologies like to create important insights for the business, artificial intelligence.
A User experience design is a key to capital and funding
Investors make investment decisions depending on gut feeling and confidence in a product. If you are in an initial stage startup looking to raise money, do not underestimate the value of adding a UX designer to the team to make your prototype run smoothly and naturally. Investors will be amazed if your new software has a strong use case.
The move over the past few years has been immense. Right now, the hottest hire in Silicon Valley is not a data scientist or a developer. Rather, it is a UX designer. Design is a competitive advantage as software customers progressively expect software interactions to be intuitive out of the box. Venture capitalists understand this trend, and in recent years’ VC firms have been employing design partners to make investment decisions, and the trend is only growing.
Hiring a UX designer for your startup
By now, you must have understood why startups should have a good UX design. With the startup ecosystem moving fast, it is imperative that user experience design and testing be on any founder’s mind from the first day.
Ideally, you must appoint an experienced UX expert in your team who will guide you through the process of developing and testing a new product. However, the reality is that UX experts are extremely important now, and as such, they are costly and difficult for new start-ups to appoint. Many new startups have opted for less-experienced UX teams to do the work, but often with uninspiring results as UX design mainly depends on intuition and experience.
What makes a good UX design?
Good UX is an art form, and it generally takes someone experienced to implement it. For a running startup, communicating an idea about a product or service is not that simple, as there is no pre-established ground to work from. A UX designer’s expertise is therefore essential here, as they can guide the startup through what works and what does not, and define why some ideas may seem great in belief but in practice, they are less than enticing to end-users.
To understand the impact of a UX design, let us have a look at some of the elements that a design must include:
Color: The choice of the color palette is important for attaining a good UX as it relates directly to the product audience. The correct use of color psychology can lead to an increase in site conversion and can drive sales in the preferred demographics also.
Voice: A good UX is very human, but bad UX cancels out a human element. The adage of “if you want to tell something, emotionalize it”, as most of the startups are keen to sell and create a connection of emotional tie with the consumer. This ultimately leads to customer retention, and if the voice of a website is emotional, then the customers can be attracted immediately.
CTA: As the founder of a startup, you should not assume that the message is clear. The Call to Action (CTA) must be direct. If you are using a sign-up, register, or sign in buttons, make sure they are visible. Some may not differentiate between the signup and register buttons, so the action, as well as the intention, must be clear.