Why should firms make the financial and time commitment to get the user experience right?

Episode Transcript

Moderator:  Hi, welcome to One Question with UpTop Health. Often when we’re working on projects with clients they find the UX process isn’t necessarily easy and a lot of them are resistant to doing the right things when it comes to proper user experience design. It requires a lot of effort on the client’s part and a lot of effort on the agency’s part. So it’s money and time and what we’ve seen with our experiences is a lot of clients will kick the UX problem can down the road. So the question I have today is, “Why should firms make the financial and time commitment to get the user experience right?” And Craig we’re going to start with you today.

Craig: Great. That’s a great question. If you think of it from a business perspective, there’s a misconception about what UX is. A lot of times they’re looking at the visual presentation on a digital device or the UI, if you will, and where the big impact is – and one of the big values, is in the process of thinking through what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. Reframing that problem using curiosity to look at different ways to approach that problem and solve that problem. That’s really at the heart of the UX process to then create that effortless experience or that digital experience that then converts to some sort of ROI, however, you’re measuring it.

And what we’ve seen is a lot of times clients have delayed making decisions. And with the deadline still looming, the time to actually plan, discover, document the requirements, talk to end users, gather all that information; the research and insights part gets really compressed. They want to move straight to the actual “pen to paper,” if you will, with the actual design or the wireframing and they’re missing the whole value of the UX design process, which is the problem solving, the thinking up-front, and the planning.

The other side of it is moving full steam ahead with just design and business and not looping in the technology side of the company because then you end up designing things and gathering requirements without a sense of the technical constraints that you’re going to work within. So if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you have technology, business, and design as the three circles that intersect. The closer you could pull those three circles together, the bigger the impact would be with UX. So that’s how I look at it from a business perspective. Mike, what are your thoughts?

Michael: Those are all great points Craig. There are a lot of stats out there that say that companies that lead with design and perform UX research are more successful. But I’m going to hone in on a part of what you are asking, John, which is doing the hard work. I don’t necessarily think it’s hard work per se just to do UX research or doing the due diligence of getting to know your customers, getting to know what their needs are, and making sure that your business is meeting those needs, and that those gaps are closed as much as possible. That’s what you really need to do and it’s not necessarily hard work.

Focusing on the second part of your question, which is, does doing UX pay off? Going back to what Craig was saying about ROI, there is a way you can measure UX. Imagine that the goal is to reduce the amount of customer support calls and/or tickets that are filed on your website. You need to first establish what that benchmark is for the current cost and let’s say that we measure the ROI on an annual basis. I’m going to throw some numbers out here. In this example, let’s say that the company fields about 50,000 support calls or tickets that year and each one of those cost the company $2 a ticket and that total cost is $100,000, right. If you design and improve the customer or user experience and that might be incorporating a self-service portion on your member portal, as an example. You could potentially reduce the call volumes to let’s just say 10,000 a year versus the 50,000 that I said earlier. That would be a savings of $80,000.

Now that’s just the savings on the reduced amount of tickets, right, but then you can go as far as starting to measure how much staff do you actually need in the customer support center to handle that? If you don’t need that large of staff, you can reduce that amount and then start to look at how much you’re actually paying in labor costs. The point is you can actually measure ROI if you dig deep enough and look at the numbers. That’s what I wanted to get across in terms of what you were saying about the payoff for actually doing UX and how you can measure it.

Moderator: Thanks, Mike. Thanks Craig.