Business: Value of User Experience

This column is the first in a series that will offer insights on how to help companies progress from delivering mediocre user experiences, as is all too common, to producing truly great experiences that differentiate their products and services in the marketplace. Doing so requires a radical transformation in the way business executives and UX teams engage in creating user experiences.

This series is not about making incremental improvements to the way UX teams work. It is about taking a different approach and driving radical transformation within organizations. No major changes in history have ever come about by playing it safe. Having said this, all of the ideas that we’ll share in this series have proven effective in one business context or another. Read More

“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”—Alan W. Watts

Making a Business Case for User Experience

Building modern software products is expensive. The design and implementation of a product user experience typically requires 40% of the overall software development cost. Therefore, on a $2 million software development project, building the user experience will require roughly $800,000 of the project budget. This is a non-trivial amount of money. Of course, just designing and building the product is not the end of it. There are the costs of marketing, advertising, and selling the product, as well as the cost of supporting it after its release. The total expense of creating a software product can easily run into millions of dollars. Read More

The field of UX design is vast and expansive. It impacts every organization in the world. No business remains untouched by modern design sensibilities. As Adam Judge has said, “The alternative to good design is bad design. There is no such thing as no design.”

But what is the worth of good design to an organization? Do UX designers add value to businesses in tangible and intangible ways? Yes! Studies suggest that the ROI of UX design could be as high as 9,900%! Furthermore, according to McKinsey, companies that score in the top quartile of the McKinsey Design Index outperform industry benchmark growth by 2:1. Read More