Business Goals vs. User Experience (UX)

From the translator: There are many options for translating the term User Experience (UX) into Russian:

• customer satisfaction
• practice of use
• general user experience
• ...

but none of them will be accurate.


Some people think wrongly that this is a synonym for User Interface (UI) or usability. But UX is a subjective assessment of the degree of convenience of user interaction with the site, and usability is often a qualitative indicator that often uses statistics as tools: for example, for how many clicks we can order goods from an online store ( “Difference between Usability and User Experience” ) .

An article on User Experience on wikipedia.
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In order not to be confused in terms, I have replaced User eXperience with UX everywhere in translation.

Would you agree that creating a convenient UX is the main task of a web designer? I guess what your answer will be ... and it is not true !

I can assume that not everyone answered "yes", but most did. Many web designers have come to believe that UX is an end in itself. I believe that we are deceiving ourselves and this, sometimes, harm our customers. The truth is that business goals must stand higher than UX. Profit making is much more important than just a site with satisfied visitors. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But before you make a flame in the comments, listen to me.

Harsh reality

Let's start with the harsh truth of life. If the company does not believe that the site will be profitable (financial or otherwise), then it will not create the site.

Whatever we think, but the main task is to achieve the business goals of the customer. Remember that UX is only a means to achieve the main goal. We do not create UX to make users happy. We make it so that the site is convenient to perform those functions that bring income to the customer.

The importance of UX

Let me be clear. I do not claim that UX is not important. I believe that UX is the main tool for achieving business goals. A well-designed site gives visitors the ability to easily perform the actions that we want from it.

Satisfied visitors give us many advantages. They can make a good advertising site and are more likely to recommend your service to others, will be more patient if something happens accidentally. They can become valuable volunteers with countless ideas to improve the site or products. They are much more valuable than any focus group! In essence, it is these satisfied visitors that generate revenue.

The time and effort spent on improving the UX will be worth it.

When UX interferes with business goals

You can argue that this is all idle talk, and that business goals and UX actually go hand in hand. In general, I agree, but there are times when they diverge, and then we must understand that profits are higher than UX.

For example, we, web designers, often complain when customers ask to add a new field to a web form, explaining that it is necessary to collect demographic information. We rightly prove that it will annoy visitors and reduce the quality of perception of the site. But we have to ask ourselves: will these fields be the reason why users do not fill out the form at all (which we fear), or it will only lead to a slight annoyance. If, ultimately, they fill out a form and the company will be able to gather valuable information, then this little annoyance pays for itself.

Do you keep the right balance?

I am a little worried that this post will be misunderstood. But I am sure that the community of web designers is in danger if he does not see anything besides UX. I am convinced that we need to devote more time to understanding and achieving business goals, as we did before when creating the UX.

And at the end I will ask: during the last project, how much time did you spend on creating roles, testing the user interface and the UX as a whole? How this compares to the amount of time spent on studying business goals and creating the conditions for performing the necessary business actions from a visitor

Ask yourself if you balanced everything correctly?

Original article: “Business Objectives vs. User Experience "Paul Boag

Paul Boag is the founder of the British design agency Headscape, the author of the Website Owners Manual and the host of the popular Boagworld web design podcast .
Website: http://www.boagworld.com | Twitter