User experience (UX) informs your consumer's overall impression of your business. Like all other first impressions, you need to make this one count, or else your buyer might just consider going elsewhere. Unfortunately, many new business owners may underestimate the importance of user experience.
Sometimes building a great product isn’t always enough. You need to offer a simple, unique user experience to make the visit memorable and worth sharing with others. To help, eight professionals from
Young Entrepreneur Council explain what they’ve learned about the importance of UX and how they have used these lessons to enhance this experience for their customers.
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Young Entrepreneur Council members share tips on creating a valuable user experience. PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS.[/caption]
1. Put Yourself In Your Customers’ Shoes
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes! Successful companies tend to promote customer centricity throughout all their business functions. While a strong user experience often characterizes a positive and simple interaction with your product, the focus should not only be on the sales process. An equal level of a “white glove” service approach should be used for designing a user-friendly experience for your customer life cycle. Focus on being a trusted partner and an accessible business in order to foster positive customer interactions. If every touch point with a customer provides a positive experience, it promotes further engagement with your product and an increased likelihood of word-of-mouth. Making customers your advocates is always the best approach to growing your business. -
Neel Kawale,
Haüskey
2. Focus On These Three Components
John Paul Dejoria once told me that he wasn’t in the sales business—he was in the reorder business. This changed my perspective on user experience. My focus shifted to three simple concepts that transferred me from sales in to reorders: 1) Solution—people are always looking for solutions to everyday challenges and if you can clearly communicate and deliver this, you will be head-and-shoulders above the competition; 2) Simplicity—people love simple things that have a direct impact on their daily life and no matter how advanced or amazing your product or service is, if it is inconvenient it will lose market share, in some cases to inferior, simpler concepts; 3) Empowering—when people find a solution that is simple, they feel empowered and want to tell everyone! The key to unlocking exponential success is to move from having consumers to cultivating “brand evangelists” that spread the gospel of your brand. User experience is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Create a solution, keep it simple and empower everyone who comes in contact with you. -
Kelly Cardenas,
Kelly Cardenas Salon
3. Offer Convenience And Credibility
User experience is what our business lives on. When selling a commodity item, it is very difficult to differentiate yourself on price. Customers nowadays value convenience, customer service and website simplicity. Especially with these novel times, customer buying patterns have slightly changed, and the values are tied more to ease of purchase and the credibility of the business’s online presence. -
Tyler Bray,
TK Trailer Parts
4. Trust Designers, Not Product Managers
Trust designers, not product managers. At the end of the day, many people have ideas of what will be a good user interface or user experience but more often than not, you need to trust in a designer that has a good vision of what the user is experiencing. Often, they are designing with that user in mind at a very granular level, so trust them to get it right and follow up with their motivations. -
Nicole Munoz,
Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.
5. Focus On Engaging Your Customers
We found initially we got great feedback from what we were outputting from a data perspective, but the greatest shortcoming was the user interface and user experience. The navigation and overall look weren’t keeping audiences engaged, and at the end of the day you can have the greatest product known to mankind, but if you can’t capture your audience, you lose customers. User experience trumps functionality any day. Take the old Viral Nation website for example—for the longest time it never did us justice and potential clients always had perceived issues because of the outdated look of our website, but once people talked to us they realized how much more we could do! -
Joe Gagliese,
Viral Nation Inc
6. Ask For Direct Feedback
We learned that asking our customers directly about their experience on a one-on-one basis, by the phone or even over a Zoom call, can be incredibly valuable. User experience tools and testing services are great, but the emotional investment a true customer has is very different. When we receive feedback directly from them, it allows us to make some key improvements to our user experience, which ultimately benefits every single one of our customers. -
John Lie-Nielsen,
One Park Financial
7. Include Compelling Headlines And Calls To Action
I learned how important it is for all of our websites to contain compelling calls to action, engaging headlines and bulleted content to captivate the reader and make the text easier to skim. Engaging headlines and calls to action increase click-through rates and, in turn, keep visitors on the site longer. Bulleted content helps highlight the most important text such as features or benefits. -
Kristin Kimberly Marquet,
Marquet Media, LLC
8. Optimize For Mobile
More than 53% of all web traffic today comes from mobile. If your site is not optimized, you are going to lose visitors. You want to make sure that it looks as good on the smartphone as it does on the desktop. Visitors must be able to scroll through it, swipe and click without any delays and interruptions. The page has to change its size in accordance with the device's screen size. Also, it's important to make sure that there are clearly defined conversion points. Many companies still avoid calls to action for the fear of looking too salesy, but your visitors need them. Calls to action help people navigate through your site and get them closer to solving their problem—the reason why they came to your site in the first place. -
Solomon Thimothy,
OneIMS 