A product that’s successful is one that your customers are going to love and hopefully, share that love by showing it off to everyone they know. Many businesses can fail at the final hurdles of product development by not thinking about UX design and what the customer actually wants from their products or services.
Any business can make an assumption or guess what a customer wants but the reality of this is that it’s not always guaranteed to work out. When you’re a business that’s investing hundreds and thousands of dollars into a new product, the last thing you want it to do is to let it fail.
In this guide, we’ll look at the importance of customers and UX design within product development and how you can successfully integrate it to provide excellent results every time. Hopefully, with the guidance, you get today, you’ll be able to make productive changes to the way you develop your company’s products in 2022 and beyond.
Why it’s important to know your customers during product development
UX design requires substantial knowledge of the customer or audience you’re aiming to reach, in order for it to be a success. Why is it important to know your customers during product development?
The money you invest into product development should provide the best ROI possible. The same goes for UX investments. The ROI on UX investments is 9,900%, with every $1 invested returning $100. There are many reasons why you should be involving your customers in every stage of a product’s development.
It’s useful in knowing what’s trending and what’s popular
Some businesses can be switched on and knowledgeable about what’s performing well in their industry, what’s missing potentially, and what might have already been exhausted as a product or service.
Paying attention to your market demographic and what they’re using or talking about themselves is extremely helpful for creating products that are more bound to gain success than those where you’re making assumptions.
Tells the customer you’re paying attention to their needs
When you create products that level up from previous products and have taken into consideration consumer feedback, it shows customers that you’re paying attention to them.
UX design is part of the customer’s overall experience with the business and brand in general. Businesses can grow revenues anywhere between 4-8% above their market when they prioritize customer service experiences.
Builds brand loyalty and a community of loyal customers
Creating brand loyalty is key when keeping customers happy. It’s notoriously harder to retain customers than it is to get them in the first place.
Customer service and their experience of the brand are also vital with nearly three out of five consumers reporting good customer service builds loyalty to a brand.
How to incorporate UX design into product development
Now that we understand the importance of UX design when developing a product, how do you successfully incorporate it? Hopefully, this step-by-step guide should enable you to approach your next project with a refined process that makes UX design an integral part of the journey.
Understand what makes new product development successful.
With every project you undertake as a business when it comes to creating a new product, it’s good practice to look at your failures previously – where applicable of course.
Maze’s new product development guide is useful for any business that doesn’t have historical data to look back on. Understanding what makes a new product successful during its development is good for future product launches.
Look at what features a product had that worked well for customers and those that perhaps failed to have the desired impact that you’d hoped to have. Not every product development project is going to fit the same mold but there are likely certain methods that will work better.
Know what your customer’s wants and needs are.
To incorporate UX design into your product development, you need to know what your customer’s wants and needs are. Simply guessing what they want isn’t great for business and it’s likely going to result in products that are hit and miss.
It’s important for your brand reputation that you’re hitting the mark almost every time. Doing the research means discovering what problems your ideal customers face and how your product can solve those problems.
Create an efficient onboarding process.
Within the product development process, onboarding is a good opportunity to set a good impression on your users. Creating an efficient onboarding process is going to help set you off to a good start if done correctly.
Start off with the basics and create an onboarding where users have access to the bare minimum. Try not to give them too much information at once as it might overcomplicate things and as a result, could cause a drop in engagement.
Think about how you gather information to make it interesting and provide demos where possible to make the experience more accessible to all those testing out your products for the first time.
It’s important to remember when it comes to UX design that nothing should take too long. When requesting more complex data, be sure to offer a high-value reward. Keep the users engaged and willing to interact.
Keep up communications with all team members.
Product development involves more than just one or two individuals. Sometimes, it takes a whole workforce to achieve product success in most cases. That means communication with your team and an understanding of your team are essential.
The more communication you have in place, the more effective your projects will end up being. In fact, teams who communicate effectively may end up increasing their productivity levels by as much as 25%.
With software development, create collaborative goals and check in regularly with what progress is being made and what can be focused more succinctly on.
Be sure to set deadlines and put in place monitoring that’ll help complete the project in good time.
Conduct A/B testing and collect user feedback.
When creating a product, you want to get honest user feedback, regardless of the success you’ve had. Even those products that have gone down a storm will have critiques made about them. As a business, you must be willing to take that user feedback and refer to it when amending products and moving forward with new projects.
A great way to utilize UX design in product development is by conducting A/B testing. There may be certain elements or features of the product that you’re unsure about and may want to change or adapt.
It’s proven that UX design involving A/B testing can increase conversion rates by 400%.
Measure user engagement
The data-driven world that many businesses thrive in nowadays is helpful when it comes to understanding the product’s performance. Regardless of how many people have bought the product or purchased the service, it’s important to measure user engagement.
Measuring user engagement can help your product development team to understand what worked and what hasn’t. If it’s an application, for example, it can be helpful to monitor the user’s usage of the app and the number of active users.
For products in general, looking at who has purchased the product and gathering feedback on how frequently it’s used, can be useful data to move forward with.
The benefits of using UX design
UX design incorporated within product development is critical for creating the best products for your business. UX design in general is a great practice to implement because it can strengthen the relationship between the brand and its customers.
You can create better products by considering UX design and in some cases, it can help minimize the cost of product development in general. There’s no point in spending money on certain parts of the process if you’re already aware of the little impact it’ll make on the product’s success.
As well as doing the obvious, which is satisfying your customers’ needs and wants, it’s also going to help build brand loyalty over time. A trusted brand that churns out great products with high value, is a recipe for success. It’s also going to help spread the message that your brand should be trusted by even those that haven’t interacted with your brand before.
Integrate UX design into product development for your business
For businesses old and new, there are always improvements that can be made to the process of product development. Integrating UX design can do wonders for creating more products that thrive when launched on the market, instead of missing the mark and wasting precious business funds.
Utilize these tips to integrate UX design successfully into every product development you do moving forward.
