UX as business strategy

 

 

As you may have gleaned from the banner on the homepage, “good design is good business”, so said former CEO of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr. Speaking to students in 1973, Watson famously said “We are convinced, that good design can materially help make a good product reach its full potential.” It may have taken the world a while to catch up with this sort of thinking, but he’s in good company nowadays. Both Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Mike Gebbia, founder of AirBnB, feel the same way:

“Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon. AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.” – Forbes Technology Council

We need to stop thinking of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) as separate or specialized disciplines, but rather part of broader business strategy. UX strategy then, is a way of thinking that informs and directs teams dedicated to better serve the user. By doing this you will increase user adoption, productivity and loyalty. As more and more businesses digitise their offering and more and more customers interact with businesses through a screen, it is essential that UX is core to business strategy.

Part the reason UX is not implemented successfully at companies still in transition, is due to how UX professionals communicate the value of their discipline. UX experts should engage with all parts of business, allowing others to take ownership of the user’s experience in their respective fields in an informed and sustainable way. It is therefore the role of those within UX to communicate disseminate their learnings among the various divisions with their business.  Tech teams and divisions have traditionally worked in siloed environments (at least in my experience at various tech companies) and so it is our task to integrate all parties and get them thinking about the user. Our tasks are not only to conduct research or design wireframes but also communicate the value of our user engagements, to allow others to benefit and add value.

As further evidence of the effectiveness of an integrated UX approach, we can look again to the Forbes Technology Council:

“Good user experience is clearly good for business. Studies show that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention and increased market share, according to a study done by Forrester. When compared to their peers, the top 10 companies leading in customer experience outperformed the S&P index with close to triple the returns. Forester Research shows that, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return. That’s an ROI of a whopping 9,900 percent.”

If you’re not championing UX as central to business, you and those you work with, will not truly reap the rewards of the digital revolution.

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