Regardless of the product or service you’re trying to sell, user experience design or UX for short, is an integral part of the development process. Without attention to how the users will interact with your product and implementing the right features that will satisfy their needs, they’re not likely to have the best experience.
User experience is a big one for businesses, with 13% of customers telling 15 or more people about their bad experiences. Word of mouth, while it can be great advertising for business, can also have the complete opposite effect.
What emerging technologies are currently in existence for UX design and how is it’s role within user experience design, shaping the future of it? In this guide, we’ll look at the importance of UX design for business and what emerging technologies are changing it. Lastly, you’ll gain some helpful insight into how you implement good UX design into your business.
The importance of UX design for your business
The UX design is what connects your product or service to the user who is utilizing it for their benefit. It help makes the product useful to the user, providing a whole host of benefits depending on what it is they’re using. Here are just a few ways UX design is important for your business in 2022.
Helps significantly lower business costs
As a business, any savings you can make during product development projects is just one area that can help widen profit margins and grow company revenue over the time.
With the right planning and preparation, budgets can make savings that help with further product development down the line. From creating presentation templates for professionals going into stakeholder meetings, to conducting UX testing.
User experience design is something that can be injected into all areas of the process.
Improves conversions
The tough part with any business is trying to convert leads to customers. The lead’s experience can be determined depending on where they are in the buyer funnel. Perhaps they’re only just approaching the brand for the first time. UX design implemented into the brand’s website is what might help convert them to a paying customers.
The more conversions you can generate, the better and according to Forester, good UX design can raise conversion rate by up to 400%. It’s something that’s certainly worth introducing.
Nurtures customer relationships
With good UX design, you help create content and features that connect with your customers. Nurturing customer relationships is something that’s important to do throughout the customer journey whether they’ve purchased a product or service yet.
By growing relationships with you customers, you’re likely to improve the brand’s loyalty.
Encourages word of mouth referrals
Like we mentioned, word of mouth referrals can be a great thing if you’ve created a good UX design, rather than neglecting to think about it whatsoever. Word of mouth referrals have the best chance of converting new customers as 88% of people trust a brand recommended by a friend or family member.
What emerging technologies are changing UX design?
There are a number of emerging technologies that certainly help to shape and enhance user experience in design. What should businesses be looking out for as we head through 2022 and beyond?
Touchless/Gesture control
Many consumers are getting used to touchless or gesture-controlled appliances and devices. For online banking apps, they’re using both mobile device’s for their touch ID and facial ID technology to log in without passcodes.
These touchless gestures are something that have made using products or services a lot easier and enjoyable. It’s a fun and interactive way of doing something that can often be monotonous.
For businesses who are looking to remove pinch points or stressful experiences from their products, introducing touchless control is a technology that alleviates these issues.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence or AI for short is one that has certainly become a major investment for many businesses across a variety of industries. The global AI market value is expected to reach a whopping $267 billion by 2027.
How is it changing UX design though? Well, for one, chatbots have become the norm on websites now and mobile applications too. With machine learning, it helps elevate the user’s experience and creates a highly personalized relationship with the business or brand they’re interacting with.
Designers are exploring the ways AI can help integrate more features to products or services that consumers use to help create an out-of-this-world experience that’s new. There’s a lot of scope with this technology that will only become more mind-blowing as it advances.
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
Another technology that’s grown significantly since it’s inception is virtual reality. For a time, VR wasn’t really used to it’s full potential in the early days. However, since the technology has improved, virtual reality is seeping heavily into the gaming industry and across business industries where in-person events are being made more immersive.
Within UX design, it can help help design products that users can actually immerse themselves in fully without any problems occurring.
AI is another form of realty that uses technology to further expand on the existing world we live in. It’s been used to create filters and virtual experiences that show up on a user’s phone or tablet device.
For designers, it’s an opportunity to explore what can be created to lay on top of real world experiences to really enhance the journey the customer goes on.
Robotics and Automation
Robotics, although a little worrying for some, is an exciting growth in technology that has really taken flight over the last couple of decades. While there are those who believe robots are taking away jobs, they’re actually helping many to improve business operations and to aid the UX design process with the use of robotics and automation in particular.
With automation, many designers can automate certain tasks, rather than having to manually input everything and spending hours on something that robotics could do in seconds.
Research on your customers is still key to helping provide the best user experience but with the helping hand of robotics and automation technology, certain processes can be streamlined and made easier.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Physical devices that are connected to the internet for the benefit of collecting and sharing data. Otherwise referred to as the Internet of Things or IoT, it’s a great technology for UX designers to learn what customers need when it comes to their products.
A lot of the things that consumers use in their day to day lives is becoming part of this technology. It’s good for designers to look at how the functions and the products themselves so that a better user experience can be achieved.
How to implement good UX design into your business
A good UX design for your business, whatever it’s used for, is important to implement this year for the future. Here are a few ways to introduce UX design in anything you create for your brand or business.
Put yourself in the mind of the customer
Think abou the customer and what they’re after when it comes to their experiences. Consider it in relation to the product or service’s purpose and what you’re wanting them to achieve on a personal level, rather than making it all about the business and what will provide the best revenue.
Use human psychology and emotion
Putting yourself into the shoes of the customers is more than just imaginging what they would need and want to experience. It’s good to tap into the emotional and psychological side of your customer.
When customers land on your page or they pick up your product for the first time, what emotions do you want them to feel? The right mixture of features and elements are going to help contribute to successfully achieving that emotion.
Get your pencil and paper out – or your digital pen and paper
Now it’s time to put your ideas down on paper, whether that be physical or digital paper! If you’re designing a website for your restaurant for example, you need to sketch out what features your pages have and the categories your menu has.
Start testing from the beginning
Anything user-related, needs to be testing. A lot of products and user-related experiences can fail because no UX testing was done. With only 55% of companies actually conducting any UX testing, testing is critical for helping garner success for the customer’s user experience.
Make use of emerging technologies for UX design in 2022
For your business, these technologies are highly effective for use within your user experience design. In 2022, your UX design should be focusing on using these technologies to nurture leads and build brand loyalty.
