Building a website or application? Skipping this step could cost you big.
Most marketers are leaving a lot of money on the table.
And we mean a lot.
Like 50%-of-your-profits, millions-of-dollars, the-difference-between-success-and-failure, now-you-have-to-sell-your-startup-at-half-its-value kind of a lot.
How, you ask? How are companies leaving so damn much on the table?
The answer: By skipping UX (user experience) strategy.
A whopping 88% of online customers are unlikely to return to your site after a bad experience. And 46% of online shoppers say they’ve left a company website because they can’t even figure out what the hell that company does.
The truth is that frictionless UX can raise customer conversion rates by as much as 400%, according to recent research by Forrester.
And if those stats aren’t enough, just look at the stories.
Icons8 launched a website redesign that they thought was pretty and minimalistic in the right way. But their lack of UX strategy meant that same website absolutely tanked their user experience, resulting in a whopping 50% drop in icon requests.
Then there’s Digg. Remember them? (Only vaguely, right? Here’s why.) A series of user-unfriendly redesigns with no UX strategy took them from a $160 million valuation to a $500,000 sale price. That’s less than 1% of their former valuation.
And if that one doesn’t sting enough, Marks & Spencer stepped up to the UX-fuck-up plate and spent 150 million pounds (nearly $200 million) on a new website, only to lose 200 million pounds (about $260 million) as a result.
Of course, those are just retail companies and social media. We’re not even talking about truly high stakes industries—like aviation, healthcare, and government. In those industries, bad UX has quite literally led to extreme medication overdoses, plane crashes, premature hospital release for extremely sick patients, and even death.
Which brings us to our question:
Why the hell are so many companies skipping UX strategy?
In our experience, it’s one of the first things to go when companies start trying to lower their budget. Perhaps because they can’t see a way around skipping design or the coding side of things. And so something less tangible-seeming—like UX strategy and content strategy—gets the short straw.
The problem here is that it’s so short-sighted. You might have a tight budget today, but saving a few thousand now and losing out on a 400% bump in conversion rates is just foolishness. Darwin-Awards-level foolishness. Peloton tone-deaf-ad-level foolishness. Like that guy you knew in college who thought he could ride his skateboard up a wall and ended up in the hospital kind of foolishness.
You already know the moral of this story.
Don’t skip UX.
Seriously. You’ll regret it.
And if you need some help figuring out how to get it right? That’s what we’re here for.
