Long and boring sign-up forms, unresponsive website, delay in page loading, fragmented display and poorly constructed information architecture are signs of poor user experience which frustrates the customer and repel them from your brand giving a negative brand impression for your online business presence.

Thus, investing in a good UX is imperative to improve brand perception, retain users and ultimately increase revenue. Now that we know the essence of a good user experience, below are ways a bad UX can ruin your business:

Website Abandonment

A webpage abandonment according to Webopedia is:

A situation when a visitor leaves the page before completing their desired action owing to various reasons which may include cluttered, lengthy, missing or lack of targeted information for the user. Such webpage abandonment would mean that a user would exit the webpage before signing up for a newsletter or downloading a brochure and other offers.

Depending on your industry, booking abandonments, form abandonments, and cart abandonments are various kinds of abandonments that a bad UX could instigate. Although many marketing reports have shown that bad UX, price comparison, customer indecision etc. are reasons a customer could abandon your website, the numbers turns up towards 15–30% for a bad user experience.

The goal of your online business presence is to attract, retain, or engage users, and to create an experience that keeps them out of business is certainly not a right step in this direction.

Negative perception of your brand

People spend more time on websites other than yours, so once your experience gives them a cognitive burden different from their mental model with previous experience, they end up looking at your brand negatively. Opinion science and its dynamics play a big role in what an existing customer can say about your business or what new customer hears about you. These perceptions usually decide whether the sale may become last or a new one will come your way.

According to a research, 91 per cent of people read online reviews regularly or occasionally, and 84 per cent trust in online reviews as much as in personal recommendation. They make this decision quickly: 68 percent make up an opinion going through one to six online reviews. Customer loyalty is extremely important for your online business and having a bad UX isn't the way to do it. In this case, you don't just lose your business, your reputation may be damaged as well.

Appearing At The Bottom In Search Engine Rankings

The developments around machine learning and AI has turned the tide towards user experience considerations at par with the content quality in the search engine algorithms. Google has been recently focussing highly in delivering best UX to search users and this trend has been followed by other search engines as well. Hence, it has become highly crucial for an online business to ensure that they offer faster page speed, increased performance, better accessibility, a mobile friendly web platform and other user experience improvements to ensure better performance among the ranking factors.

Having a bad user experience could therefore prevent your online business from maximizing it’s full potential in organic search results costing you highly with respect to your leads and lower conversion rates. Also, when you decide to acquire users via paid search ad, a bad UX could also lead to a low Quality Score which then increases the Cost Per Click for your ad- leading further to spending unsustainable amounts in getting new users.

Competitive Disadvantage

A great way to keep users busy is by providing an excellent user experience while they interact with your business. Users will not think twice before giving away a product or application causing them frustration. In most cases, they will consider moving to the competition, even if it costs a little more.

From a business perspective, you can give your competitors an edge, since users who are attracted to their offerings have a great opportunity to move towards them. Demands for a great user experience have grown so much so that customers are no more willing to stay with a business that offers them a frustrating product experience. A good user experience is no longer a garnish in the dish, but a key ingredient of the dish itself.

It has become imperative for brands to let user experience have a stronger say in their business and to achieve the level of innovation needed to outperform competition. There is a need to create such user designs that creates a great user journey and leads them along the funnel. To find more ways for creating seamless user design read our blog on How Can UX Design Be A Differentiator For Your Brand.

Way Ahead: An Improvised User Experience Design

So, the job is to turn the bad UX into good UX in order to provide customers unique experience in their journey with you. Beating the competition and staying there requires you to create exceptional customer experience with an outstanding user experience design.

Where to start and how do we achieve that?

It's the focus on your customers - the understanding of the need to create design elements that creates awe-inspiring customer journey. It must be kept in mind that users must experience a seamless experience and ease of use while they journey with you and this cannot be achieved unless your design elements understand the need of today's users.

Hence, it is important while designing a product that although you have designed the product, you must keep the customer’s expectations from you in focus.

Companies thus need to gather insights to find out what customers think about them and can subsequently make changes to their product or service, offering better customer engagement and superior customer experience. Knowing your customer is all about identifying the most important needs and expectation of your customer in order to give them smooth experience and finally attract and retain them.

User experience design, hence, attains relevance to ensure a good CX that can easily propel your brand image. It is important as it tries to meet the exact needs of your user and ultimately offers an exceptional personalized customer experience. It aims at providing positive experiences for your customers to maintain brand loyalty and user engagement.

The Espire Way:

Therefore, if you are considering to create an awe-inspiring user experiences for your business, be sure to choose a design agency that knows the value of the design and is aware of the return on investment towards an improvised user experience. Here, at Espire, we leverage customer moments to transform your digital touchpoints into powerful customer engagement platforms - empowering global businesses to build meaningful connections with the audience and a strong competitive edge.