Measuring the value of user experience for your business

Many companies recognise the importance of developing products and services that address customer needs. Because these needs continually evolve, having a strong user experience (UX) team is essential to keeping up with these changes and remaining relevant. This is especially true in today's challenging economic environment, where businesses are under stress caused by inflation and shrinking household budgets.

It can often take time to quantify and justify the investment needed in UX to senior stakeholders, especially when businesses are looking for ways to cut costs. With the UK Consumer Confidence Index being at a negative 18, now is the perfect time to take stock and establish a strategy to support investment in UX.

What challenges do companies face when trying to quantify UX ROI?

In my career helping build UX teams in businesses across various industries, I have seen how difficult it is to quantify the return on investment in user experience. Accurately identifying which elements contribute to business success and understanding your brand's connection with your customers is often incredibly difficult to quantify.

I also understand the challenge of measuring the success of your UX investment and the significant time it can take for the full benefits of UX investment to translate into measurable results. Shareholders want to see a return on their investment sooner rather than later, making it difficult to justify initial costs especially when times are tough.

It can also be difficult to know what measurement framework you should use. UX teams don’t typically subscribe to a set of standardised metrics, making it difficult to compare results between projects and industries. It’s difficult to tell stakeholders things have gone great when you don’t have an established idea of what “great” looks like.

Units of measurement for UX ROI

An effective way to show stakeholders that UX is invaluable to a business’s success is numbers. Being able to show quantifiable, objective results that directly tie to overarching business goals can make justifying expenditure on UX to senior leadership a much easier task.

The first step is to establish your key metrics, focusing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative. These can include user engagement metrics, for example, time spent on site, page views and click-through rates.

One way is by measuring customer retention rates and then mapping these to moments in the customer journey when customers abandon their cart. Business leaders understand customer retention rates, so tying this metric to specific customer pain points provides a useful reference when assessing the effectiveness of any changes made to the user experience. These figures give a clearer view of the impact of the improved customer service and show the direct correlation between retention and profits.

Other metrics can focus on conversion specifically, such as purchase rates, sign-ups or task completion rates. The time these tasks take can also be measured to add extra depth to your UX reportings. Tracking error rates and identifying roadblocks can also form part of an ongoing measurement program, as this will provide ample opportunities for continuous improvement and can evolve to meet changing customer needs or outside factors affecting profitability.

Finally, qualitative feedback measuring UX’s impact on user satisfaction is another effective way to see how your users are feeling in easily understandable and shareable terms. Setting up a simple customer feedback mechanism, like a survey, is a great way to gain new understanding when it comes to your customers’ needs and wants, and can sometimes reveal surprising insights into user behaviours that provide powerful benefits to your business.

Securing support for your UX research

Now that you have the evidence, the next step is to foster understanding with stakeholders, helping them appreciate the value of their UX investment. While this is vital for business survival, it is nevertheless often difficult to execute.

When numbers fail to impress, turning to storytelling can be a powerful tool to showcase the importance of UX to wider stakeholders. While numbers provide concrete evidence, storytelling can breathe life into your data, making it resonate with an outside audience. By understanding your audience's needs, you can effectively combine the two to fully illustrate the impact of UX.

Creating a narrative linking your data and customer satisfaction can further strengthen how stakeholders understand customers and can add real emotional weight to the bare numbers. Bringing examples of real user sentiment to life through quotes or video snippets can enable you to communicate in a compelling language that speaks to the whole business, extending beyond design teams.

Critically, keeping stakeholders updated through regular updates that closely reference the impact UX changes can have on broader business goals can help to calm any nerves and support a better understanding of the value of UX investments.

UX is incredibly important when it comes to keeping customers happy and spending. Not only will it increase customer satisfaction, but the customer return rate too, building a loyal customer base for tough times. When customers feel they have had a great experience, they are less likely to swap to competitors or decide to leave the product or service as a whole.

UX is essential to business success and maintaining revenue, especially in an age when customers have higher expectations than ever. Ultimately, this will help to protect a necessary but often invisible cog in your business model.

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