UX Is All About Sales
I’ve lost count of how many times I showed clients and stakeholders the famous “Pyramid of UX” design to clearly explain exactly what UX is. Old but gold! I’m sure that a lot of you out there did the same, multiple times! Raise your haaands!
In my view, this is a clear symptom that UX, still in 2019, is not yet completely understood. On the other hand, it is a very broad and young discipline, so maybe the misunderstandings are comprehensible. In the end, our role is to educate our customers, colleagues, and various stakeholders to understand UX; but most importantly, for them to realise all of the cool advantages for their work and businesses.
Some time ago I attended a conference and listened to a speaker — a C-level of one of the top 3 telecom companies in the EU — say something along the lines of: “ Hey, we need to increase revenues, not to enhance the design, I don’t care about UX, I can do the UX for our App myself! ” Bam! Decades of wasted User Experience…. Well, all joking aside (and this is some damn serious stuff) that sentence made it very clear to me: the majority of people do not understand that UX is very connected to a business, and in one word, to sales. Yeah, yeah, I know; UX is about supporting people in their tasks, making things simpler, and summed up it is about making the world a better place. That’s true indeed. That’s absolutely a part of my mission as a UX designer, and I sincerely hope it’s also in your vision. But, hey! As long as we don’t work for non-profit organisations, voluntary associations et similia (but also in these cases I wouldn’t completely exclude the economic dimension), in the end, our main goal is to simplify things. I take it holistically: it means to make information clearer, explain processes, clarify conditions, and make it easier to choose between options.
This target is indeed very noble, but it’s one of the main factors to, in the end, increase… sales! Never thought about it in these terms? Well, I should have said “goals” instead of “sales” right? Let’s say that through our work we make it easier for users to achieve their goals. It could be the retrieval of information, the submission of a request, or the purchase of a product (yes, again!). In one sentence, we enhance their experience of achieving their task. Simplicity is perceived as a great value.
The (User)Experience Economy
This extended concept of experience is more and more becoming the focus of a purchase process; at least since 2001 when J. Pine and J. Gilmore wrote about it in the eye-opening book ‘’The Experience Economy’’.
In this book, they define the “experience” as a wide service with a central product to support it. Part emotional, part physical. I believe this concept of experience well represents the mechanisms and attitudes of somebody landing on an eCommerce website, for example.
The physical part is what they want to buy; let’s say a good with its price and features. The emotional part is everything around: the website, the communication, the flow, the structure of the information, not to mention the speed of loading, the quality of images, fonts, icons. But also there could be support tools to help users to decide, to compare, to configure and to interact. And think about it, this is just part of the journey which happens on a specific digital touchpoint. In the end, all of these elements make up the experience. That’s why the UX field is so damn broad. All these elements will be vital for the first “yes” from our users/customers. And this “yes” means Sales.
You might think that what we call the “physical” part — the product, the price, the features — plays a dominant role in this decision-process. This is true for sure, but nowadays in mature markets within the same product segment, the pricing and the features lists differences are often so thin that the real battle to conquer customers is played on another battlefield: the experience one. This emotional part we have described before. Here companies have the great opportunity to differentiate themselves and their product from the competition if they play well in this area. But why is the experience part so relevant for customers? Let’s take a look at a concrete example:
The UX Superpowers (And Some Useful Stats)
Let’s imagine you want to buy a new internet + voice plan for your mobile phone. The website you visit presents a clear organisation of contents because a serious Information Architect has worked on it. The products are well organized and the shelf is very compact with a reduced number of types. The types are understandable and their difference is made according to valuable information for the clients. They have a nice configurator where you can input how many minutes you are calling every month if you are abroad or not, and how much data you are using (if you watch Netflix, browse the web, stream music for example). The website also features a save function, where you can send yourself a recap and come back to the same page afterward.
How much do you think this experience will influence your decision? I say a lot. Let’s see what the stats say.
The following are just an extract of a very interesting article about measuring the benefits of UX. You can find it down here, at the bottom:
- Every $1 invested in UX results in a return between $2 and $100.
- A major eCommerce company increased sales by $300 million after changing their button text from “Register” to “Continue”
- Airbnb attributes UX for taking them from being a near-failure to being valued at $10 million.
- ESPN’s revenue increased by 35% after a homepage redesign.
- Slow-loading websites cost retailers an estimated $2 billion in lost sales each year.
- Amazon discovered that a 100ms decrease in page loading speed could cost them 1% in sales.
- Walmart Canada increased its on-site revenue by 13% after tailoring the customer experience.
As you might have noticed, some of these stats are not about UX as strictly defined. There are things such as loading time and copywriting for example. But all these apparently distinct areas are the things which users will see and evaluate in one big thing: how was the experience of searching and applying for an offer? And this is the key. UX is not just about colours and nice images. It’s about the global experience, the whole feeling. Users and clients will receive the first impression of a company, a business, and a product according to the experience they have. If it’s good they will think the company providing this product or service is also serious and professional. If it features nice tools which help their decision they will think the company is smart and their products are really designed around their needs. On the other hand, if the experience is clumsy and buggy they will think that the company is not reliable. And if it was full of dark patterns, usability traps, aggressive sales, and confirm-shaming copywriting everywhere, users will already imagine the strategy of that company and the level of their post-sale service. The experience, shortly summed up, will create the first impression and will be able to heavily influence the conversion and therefore, the sales KPIs.
Conclusion
I close with another example of how a good UX (again, largely considered) can improve sales. In 2000, a very interesting experiment to clarify the mechanisms of the choice (for us, of the sales) was carried by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. In a big grocery store, a display with 24 different types of gourmet marmalade was prepared. Some days after, a new display with just 6 types of marmalade replaced the first one. In the end, the propensity to buy was 10x more for the customers who saw the smaller display than those who saw the original one.
This means that good information architecture and an effective product organisation and presentation do influence the sales… a lot my friends :-) And to everybody who thinks they can do it on their own, without investing in professionals, I would just reply with this: Every $1 invested in UX results in a return between $2 and $100. What would be the return if we invest $0?
This is the broad UX area, and all the domains connected to UX are the crucial areas where a company should invest if they want to increase their sales. Because UX is all about Sales.
Sources
- Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999
- https://designadvisor.net/blog/ux-statistics/
- https://uxplanet.org/12-ux-principles-for-digital-commerzbank-products-6cad69091d0c
- https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better
- https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern/confirmshaming
Infographics
1: Illustration done thanks to the great visual library created by Pablo Stanley on https://www.humaaans.com/ and to the wireframes library created by Mikolaj Dobrucki on http://mikolajdobrucki.com/
2: Illustration done thanks to the great visual library created by Pablo Stanley on https://www.humaaans.com/ . Redesign of the Pyramid of Ux Design, from “The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web” Jesse James Garrett, Peachpit Press.
