Every company has their unique set of goals and objectives. But it’s very important to constantly reevaluate your results and make sure you’re on track to achieving what you set out to do. Of course, there’s many elements that factor into a business’s success and great User Experience (UX) is one of them. How can UX impact your business goals and help you fulfill your long-term strategy?

Setting Business Goals And Objectives

Our Strategic Thinking Series has already touched on the topic of strategic planning and setting business goals. For more detailed information, be sure to check it out. Setting goals and objectives is the first thing you need to do. Even the best UX will not be helpful if your objectives are not well thought-out and don’t reflect the vision of your company. There’s several tools you can use to help you draft an excellent long-term strategy. Use a SWOT analysis to get a high-level overview of where to start and create the next-steps strategy. Based on that, conduct thorough market research, analyze your suppliers and vendors as well as get a deep understanding of your company’s customers, their needs and wants. Always remember that whatever goals you set for your business should be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Timely).

Examples Of S.M.A.R.T. Business Objectives:

  • Increase net profit by 4 percent in eight months
  • Build a new product or service within the next year
  • Increase the number of client touch-points from one a month to three a month by sending out a targeted email campaign

Setting out S.M.A.R.T. goals is part of your success. If the goals are not measurable, actionable, specific, reasonable and timely it will be much harder to accomplish them. You also need to think about how everyone will play into the specific goal. Each employee and team will have their own impact on whether your company achieves your objectives or not. It’s important to share the company goals with your employees and make sure they are on board with such an action plan.

UX & Long-Term Strategy

So, how does UX fit into the goal-setting process and your company’s long and short-term objectives? First of all, there’s several UX techniques and methods that prove to be extremely helpful when planning your business strategy. You can read our eBook about useful UX methods that anyone can use. There’s several different canvases and frameworks to make goal setting and business planning easier. Those canvases force you and your team to always keep the user’s goals in mind when planning your own business goals. This ensures your objectives are focused on the customer and helps validate business plans.

Validate New Business Ideas

When launching new initiatives or projects it’s always smart to plan ahead and validate the product beforehand. Ensuring your customers or employees will benefit from the initiative will increase your chances of success. Every business venture should start out with a solid validation process that will go much smoother if you use UX tools like the User Persona Canvas or the User Journey Canvas. Alright, now let’s think about what might happen if you don’t focus on UX in your product and when planning your business objectives and strategies.

How Can Bad UX Impact Your Business Goals?

There’s several ways in which bad UX can negatively impact your business. Depending on your specific product and what your company offers to the customers, bad UX can create multiple issues. But besides negative impact outside of your organization, there’s employees inside the company that might be affected by bad UX as well. User Experience design is everywhere around us – for example, something as simple as a chair or a light switch has been designed a certain way to make our lives easier.

Negative Impact Inside Your Organization

First, let’s talk about how bad UX can impact your company on the inside. User Experience techniques can be applied to employer branding campaigns and make it easier for you to increase employees’ satisfaction. However, if you don’t work on making your organization a place where each employee feels valued and important – you might experience lower quality of service, increasing dips in efficiency and you might find it harder to recruit new employees. Take a page from UX Designer’s book – consider conducting quarter-end or year-end evaluations, find a way to include each team in your business goals, conduct interviews and questionnaires to get an overview of how you can improve your employee experience. Even small things like, for example, asking people what you can improve or setting company-wide meetings to discuss your overall strategy can make everyone feel more included.

Negative Impact On Revenue, Profitability & Sales

The next area bad UX can impact in a negative way is, of course, your revenue, customer retention, profitability, sales and market share. If your product or service has bad UX, your chances of attracting and keeping the customer attention are very slim. At the end of the day, if something is not working the way we want it to – we will simply stop using it at all. Bad products or services will simply cost you a lot of money. It’s better to invest the money upfront and focus on making your products or services tailored to the consumer, rather than pay later when you notice increasing user losses. Especially because the costs of fixing a problem are usually much higher than the costs of avoiding the problem entirely.

UX Tricks To Help You Achieve Your Company’s Objectives

There’s several ways in which UX affects your business goals. And there’s many things you can do to get closer to achieving your goals related to UX techniques and methods. The most crucial thing you need to realize is that UX impacts your business goals and that you need to find the right balance between those goals and UX goals. UX is there for the customer primarily, but it needs to support business goals as well. Here’s a few things to consider when working on a UX strategy:

1. Use Personas To Ensure Everyone Is On The Same Page

User Personas are mostly used in design teams or product development teams. Consider using them within your marketing, sales and management teams as well to pull more attention to the customer. By having a specific persona on display, you will improve your teams’ focus on the users in whatever tasks they do. Even when they plan campaigns, write emails or anything else, they will keep the users in mind during their day.

2. Customer Service Is A Powerful Tool

You have probably had a bad experience with customer service at least once. There’s many companies that don’t take their customer support very seriously. But when it comes down to achieving your business goals, support is a powerful tool that can help you accomplish those goals. That’s right. It’s not only a helping hand for your users, but it can also bring a lot of insights for your management strategy, marketing campaign and other related work. People working in customer support spend all their time at work talking to users who share their questions, concerns and issues about your product or service. Especially when you’re running an online business, the right support for the users is crucial for your long term success. So, you may want to start gathering those insights and using them when goal setting.

3. Never Discard What The Users Want

When working with a product development agency or if you have an in-house design team, you have experts at listening to what the users want. Take those wants and needs seriously. If the management says they want an instant pop-up but the design team says the users will hate that – try to look for a balanced solution. The pop-up situation is just one of many examples when a business goal could clash with the user’s needs. Just remember that whatever the situation is, discarding the users’ wants could cause a lot more problems in the future and prevent you from hitting your business goals.

If you need help with using design to achieve your business goals – contact us and let’s get started on your project!