What Is UX for Business and How It Affects Your Key Metrics

What Is UX for Business and How It Affects Your Key Metrics

What Is UX for Business?

I mentioned user experience (UX) in my articles before,  but I haven’t explained a few details about this important part of mobile app development process, and how it can improve your company’s KPIs.

I want to start from a general definition of this science (yes, I personally think that it’s science). Here what Wikipedia says about it:

“User experience (UX) involves a person's behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.”

But what does this complex definition mean to business owner who decided to develop a mobile app? In order to clarify the answer, I want to give you my definition of UX design for business:

UX design is all about solving your business problems and improving your key metrics by combining functions (features) and controls, buttons, screens, switches, processes, interactions and their placement in a mobile app, web app or other software. 

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UX design is all about solving your business problems and improving your key metrics by combining functions (features) and controls, buttons, screens, switches, processes, interactions and their placement in a mobile app, web app or other software.

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In other words, you order a solution for a particular problem not just a regular mobile app. For instance, you want to improve your repeat sales, so you order an app that will remind clients about your commodities or services at the most efficient way and time.

Some Metrics

Ok, it’s time to talk about some key performance indicators (KPI) or key metrics. Every company has their own custom metrics, but the majority of metrics are widely used within various companies. I’m talking about such things like sales, retail, marketing, help desk KPIs.

Let’s look at some KPIs and metrics that can be improved by a custom mobile app:

1. Customer Retention - the ability of your organization to retain customers over the long term and to generate recurring revenue from existing customers.

2. Incremental Sales - the amount of sales you've gained as a direct result of marketing and promotional activities.

3. Average Purchase Value - the average value of each purchase made by your customers and compares that to the average number of units per transaction.

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It’s important to remember that one app can effectively augment a few similar metrics at the same time. Pick a metric and then build a solution for it.

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4. Engagement – the indicator that shows the amount of time spent by each client on your brand.

5. Net Promoter Score -  the metric that shows how many of your clients would recommend your commodities or services to their friends.

6. Brand awareness - the extent to which a brand is recognized by potential customers, and is correctly associated with a particular product or service.

More information about various KPIs you can find at Klipfolio website.

It’s important to remember that one app can effectively augment a few similar metrics at the same time. Pick a metric and then build a solution for it. Everyone knows that every program is limited to its core functionality. You will never create a beautiful movie in the text editor, so don’t expect to solve all problems with one app. If you want to get the right solution then you should build a mobile app for a certain problem. Moreover, you have to rebuild it based on users feedback, and then you will improve metrics that you picked. Guaranteed!

How It Affects Key Metrics

From the text above we have learned what is UX for business, and got the idea of general metrics that can be improved by a business app. Now we are going to answer how UX affects business metrics. To answer the question we should look at the example. Here it is:

For instance, you are sushi restaurant owner. You have beautiful e-commerce website, where people can buy sushi. You also developed an iPhone app for the restaurant a few month ago, because everyone around did it. Your app provide your clients with cool interactive menu, and duplicates contact info from your website.

You thought that the app will improve your customer retention metric, but it didn’t happen. The reason is quite simple – you don’t give a reason to buy (hot offers notifications, discount coupons etc.), and you don’t allow clients to buy directly from the application.

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UX for business is not just about user experience, it’s about how to improve your KPIs with user experience design.

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Now, it’s time for UX to help you to solve that problems. That’s when UX designers will create the understandable app which your customers will love and use all the time, and as the result your customer retention metric will be improved.

UX for business is not just about user experience, it’s about how to improve your KPIs with user experience design.

Keep designing and building effective mobile apps for your business, and you will notice that your metrics will always be high. 

Leave your comments, email me or catch me on Twitter at @ivanzaichuk 

by Ivan Zaichuk, Founder & CEO of IvZ Solutions