High-quality customer experience (CX) is arguably the most effective way to drive engagement, spending, and loyalty for any business. User experience (UX)—the term applied more in the context of actual product use and which is a subset of CX—takes on vital importance in influencing the entire experience of the customer.
Whether we call it “CX” or “UX,” the more cohesive and meaningful the user experience, the more customers are willing to engage and form a relationship with a brand, and that ultimately means a contribution to the bottom line. However, customer experiences are still frequently inconsistent and frustrating, especially in the B2B “enterprise” space.
Top UX designers know that it’s crucial to employ design thinking and UX design methodologies to create a strong UX framework that covers product breadth, depth, and consistency. Subsequently, they often need to persuade executive stakeholders on the ROI of a UX design initiative. This is understandable, as in order to avoid a money pit while continuing “to keep the trains running,” hard-nosed executives need to see a convincing projection of returns (the ROI of UX) before committing valuable resources to various departments.
In order to make their case, UX designers need to come up with rock solid data on successful redesign projects. However, digging up data on similar B2B ventures can be challenging as most B2B companies don’t provide case studies, or disclose very much data on the ROI.
Getting caught in this unavoidable conundrum is where most UX design teams will find themselves, as was the case on this recent enterprise-level B2B platform redesign project. The UX design team came up with a presentation to the C-suite that was a combination of what we need to do, how we’re going to do it, what it will take, how long it will take, how much will it cost, and here’s the projected ROI based on reasonable assumptions.
Goals of the UX Redesign to Increase the ROI of UX
First, we needed to make the case for why we were doing the UX redesign project. The B2B platform was about seven years old and was made up of a hodge-podge of UIs, and several different-looking web-applications that were created at different times. As the company was maturing, it needed a unified UX design and a brand-consistent look and feel.
Apart from the ‘frankendesign’ and navigation issues, the platform was fraught with severe usability issues because the company hadn’t employed a skilled interaction designer and a prevailing attitude of “build it fast, we’ll fix it later.”
We laid out four areas that needed to be improved in order to elevate the user experience on the platform:
1. Usability (discoverability, navigation, UI standards)
2. Consistency (UI design, interaction design)
3. Workflow (user flow, interaction …