Investing in UX – User Experience – isn’t just about design—it’s about driving measurable business outcomes. Research shows 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a poor digital experience. This highlights how poor UX can directly impact customer retention and revenue. By prioritising UX, you can improve satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, your bottom line.
The consequences of poor UX extend beyond user frustration—they directly impact revenue. 70% of consumers have stopped using a brand due to poor customer experience, while 73% of business leaders confirm a direct link between customer service and company performance.
This data underscores a critical truth: neglecting UX doesn’t just annoy users—it drives them away, resulting in lost revenue and weakened customer loyalty. If you’re building a product around a web or mobile application, investing in UX isn’t optional—it’s essential for preventing these losses and ensuring long-term success.
Building User Centred Products
The difference between a successful app and one that users delete immediately comes down to its UX. If your app is to succeed, UX design must be a core part of your product strategy, not an afterthought.
Prioritising UX isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about driving measurable business outcomes like customer satisfaction, which leads to retention, which results in revenue growth. All measurable.
The foundation of UX success lies in solving real user problems. A visually stunning app that lacks core functionality will be quickly abandoned because it fails to address user needs.
This highlights the importance of conducting user research to understand what problems users actually care about. There’s no point in building features or solving problems users don’t value (aka finding Product Market Fit). Great UX is all about delivering real value by solving the right problems for your users.
Many companies struggle to create effective UX, often because they fail to incorporate user feedback early or consistently. To address this, adopting the ‘build-measure-learn‘ approach allows you to continuously refine your product based on real user input.
By starting with interviewing users to understand their needs, then making it easy for users to provide feedback at each iteration of your design, you can ensure your product evolves to meet user needs, significantly reducing the risk of developing a solution that misses the mark.
Simplifying is Optimising for User Experience Design
High cognitive load—the mental effort required to use a product—ruins user experience. This is why “ease-of-use” is a key design goal.
When users feel overwhelmed by complex interfaces, they’re more likely to abandon apps or websites. To combat this, focus on reducing cognitive load by simplifying design and interactions. This means:
- avoiding information overload (simple screens),
- using familiar interactive elements (don’t be too clever),
- streamlining common tasks, and
- ensuring messages are clear and descriptive
The result is a smoother, more intuitive experience that boosts user satisfaction and increases retention—critical metrics for product success.
What do these kinds of changes look like?
- Providing real-time feedback during interactions
- Reducing typing requirements with autocomplete or drop-downs.
- Using visual weight to guide users’ attention to what matters most.
- Implementing inline validation for forms and inputs to prevent errors before they happen
These basic techniques are just to get you thinking. UX is a deep practice with lots of nuance.
The key take away is that by making interactions as close to effortless as you can (think swiping right on Tinder), you create a smoother, more intuitive experience that keeps users engaged and drives measurable results.
Performance and Loading Optimisation
Performance is the technical side of UX. Response time in a web application, in any application, is a major UX factor that impacts user satisfaction.
Jakob Nielsen’s research outlines three response-time limits:
- 0.1 seconds for an instantaneous feel,
- 1 second to maintain seamless thought flow, and
- 10 seconds is the upper limit for user attention.
Meeting those first 2 limits ensures users stay engaged and reduces frustration and abandonment. Prioritising performance in UX design is essential for creating a smooth, intuitive experience that drives conversions and retention.
This is very much about software architecture and devops – how the software behind your product is designed and the resources you can afford to run it. It’s a very technical subject and well beyond the scope of this article.
However, you can see how your site is performing using a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights that will show you where bottlenecks are and you can start discussing how to resolve them with your team.
UX Tools and Implementation
Companies that invest in UX see measurable benefits across both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. A prime example is Easyjet, which tackled the common stressors of air travel by redesigning their app and in-airport check-in process to make it more pleasant and efficient.
This UX-focused approach not only improved customer satisfaction but also streamlined operations, demonstrating the tangible business value of investing in user experience. It also shows that UX extends beyond the browser into real world interactions with your company and your brand.
To deliver exceptional UX, your team will need the right tools for the job. For user research, survey tools like Typeform and Google Forms can be used to gather insights directly from your target audience.
When it’s time to map out user flows and brainstorm ideas, whiteboarding applications such as Miro and Whimsical enable collaborative design thinking.
And when it comes to bringing interfaces to life, design and prototyping tools like Figma, Sketch, and Marvel let you create interactive prototypes for stakeholder feedback and usability testing. Having the right tools in place is essential for translating UX strategy into tangible results.
Moving Forward On UX
Investing in UX isn’t just about making your web application look better – it’s about driving measurable business outcomes through improved user satisfaction, increased retention, and higher conversion rates.
The best time to start is today. Begin by assessing your current web application against the UX principles we’ve covered and have a look at your major pages using the page speed tool. Map out your user journeys, measure your loading times, and gather feedback from actual users. Whether you choose to build an in-house UX team or work with external experts, making UX a core part of your development process will help ensure your product doesn’t just work well, but delivers experiences that keep users coming back.
