6 Reasons to Invest in Enhancing the User Experience

Summary

Have you ever interacted with a product or service and felt frustrated or confused? That is an example of poor user experience (UX). UX refers to what the user feels when utilising a product or service, including overall satisfaction and ease of use.

No matter who typically buys your products or services, they all expect seamless UX. However, you should consider certain characteristics associated with your type of business. Take business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies as an example. Their differences apply to various aspects, from the buyer personas they target, to the average speed of making a deal.

B2B companies have to take into account the needs and preferences of multiple stakeholders in the purchasing decision, which requires attention and detail to the overall brand experience, particularly when launching an account-based experience (ABX) campaign.

Enhancing UX can significantly impact your bottom line when you follow certain principles. This article explores six ways effective UX can benefit B2B organisations:

Enhanced brand perception

Design is all about making first impressions. This first impression will depend on the UI (user interface), which demonstrates how engaging and accessible design is the cornerstone to building a satisfactory UX and brand experience.

Users will remember first and foremost the frustration they felt when trying to navigate your platforms, websites, and tools, more than the aesthetics of your branded assets. Therefore, to ensure the brand perception of a user is positive, adopt these best practices:

Plan user pathways and make information easy to identify through your digital mediums: Design user flows that make it simple for prospects to get what they require from your brand, be it pricing information, educational content, or the backstory of the company’s founders.

Adopt a visually appealing colour palette: Ensure colours make the UI simple and understandable, with colours utilised strategically to denote importance and hierarchy of elements (such as the use of vibrant colours in buttons).

Make use of negative space: Avoid over-cluttering the screen with icons, copy, and buttons. Leave space between elements to allow people to navigate seamlessly with your brand website and products.

Prioritise mobile: With mobile becoming a popular choice for B2B buyers accessing content to inform their decisions, ensuring your brand digital experience is responsive and user-friendly on mobile is essential.

Example

Overpass employs simple language, bold colours, and clear blocks to deliver its message and describe a unique selling proposition (USP).

The information hierarchy is clear and the top bar allows users to easily find what they need.

Source: Overpass

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Higher ROI

UX design can reduce a website’s long-term maintenance costs. Bad UX increases bounce rates, which impacts SEO rankings, and therefore can result in lower traffic to a brand website, for instance. Bad UX can also increase churn rates when users are frustrated with bugs and cumbersome processes on platforms or apps.

Therefore, prioritising UX is a proactive approach to identify user demands and act on them before user frustration negatively impacts performance.

Here are a few benefits of investing in UX:

Reduce the need for emergency updates, by continuously assessing user demands and actioning changes as needed to the brand website, products, and platforms.
Identify audience pain points and challenges, with insights gleaned from UX research focused on collecting user feedback on their overall brand experience.
Streamline programming and development. Developers can build a website/app 33-50% faster with UX according to the Interaction Design Foundation (2021), which saves resources and time when launching products.

Improved client retention

Client retention is crucial for companies to grow and secure long-term revenue, as well as foster brand evangelism campaigns. According to Shopify (2022), retaining existing clients can be between five and 25 times less expensive than acquiring new ones (Shopify, 2022).

UX is crucial to driving client retention as it is what deems a satisfactory experience for the user when utilising products. Satisfied users are more likely to continue utilising a solution than switching for an alternative due to familiarity and the trust developed from depending on a high-quality service.

Example

Canva has a streamlined interface and easy-to-use tools that allow users to create high-quality designs without any prior design experience. As a result, people have made 15 billion designs on this platform, as seen in the screenshot below.

Canva facilitates design for non-designers by prioritising a UX that simplifies the development of graphics, when compared to professional suites.

Source: Canva

Competitive advantage

Ensuring clients have a good experience when interacting with a business can help its ability to compete better with similar companies that provide a less enjoyable brand ecosystem.

Therefore, and particularly in more traditional and less tech-savvy niches, investing in UX can be a key differential for swaying a buying committee considering options in your favour.

Example

Brands that develop low-code solutions, such as Quickbase, stand apart from competitors with more complex suites that are not beginner-friendly by favouring UX.

Source: Quickbase

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Foster client loyalty

UX is one of many ways to encourage client loyalty. According to a Merkle report, 75% of consumers consider client experience (CX) a decisive factor in establishing brand loyalty. Good CX relies on UX as a foundation to satisfy clients, which demonstrates the importance of adopting these approaches to deliver an enjoyable experience to clients.

UX also is a key element buyers consider when referring a product to a peer, particularly in the case that a peer is a beginner and is less versed in the field. UX is particularly important for onboarding and teaching beginners how to achieve goals with the products they acquire.

Increased client lifetime
value (CLTV) and revenue

Client lifetime value (CLTV) is the total sum of revenue generated from a client throughout their relationship with your brand.

Since UX helps decrease churn, it is key to CLTV and ensuring users are continuously satisfied with their acquired products and services. Therefore, UX is a method to secure long-term revenue for the organisation and avoid clients switching for competing services.

Example

Rize is a time tracking solution that adopts an omnichannel approach to deliver their brand messaging to their audience in a relevant and actionable manner. The app personalises reporting per user, ensuring each user gleans the insights most useful for them to enhance their productivity.

Source: Rize

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Revolutionise your digital B2B brand
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Final thoughts

UX is the best approach for truly understanding your audiences and their challenges when utilising solutions. By leveraging UX research and gleaning insights on user behaviour when interacting with your brand’s website, platforms, and apps, you can stand apart from competitors with an engaging digital experience that drives the results your buyers desire.

To retain clients and encourage referrals, you must prioritise UX in your business strategy and ensure your digital offerings are understandable, informative, and easy to use.

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About the Author

Kate Parish

Kate Parish is the CMO at Onilab, a web development agency. Being a top executive in a company specialising in eCommerce, she spends most of her time researching new approaches in UX/UI design, Magento PWA development, and headless commerce.

Kate also strives to keep up with the latest developments in digital marketing to adapt the company’s promotional strategy accordingly. Her primary areas of interest are SEO, branding, and social media marketing.