In today’s fast-paced world, agility is everything. You need to get your apps out there quickly to keep up with the pace of change and stay relevant in the market. But to succeed you also need to make sure your products deliver against the ever-rising expectations of your users. In short, remaining competitive is no easy feat.

So, how exactly can you produce high-quality outputs while working at speed?

You may have heard the answer lies in User Experience (UX). But what exactly is UX? And why should you look for an app development company that leads with UX?

What is User Experience?

Simply speaking, User Experience is the process of making sure that when people use a digital product, they think and feel positively about it. It’s the difference between happily making a purchase within a few clicks (like you may do on Amazon using the ‘saved cards’ feature), and getting frustrated with having to enter your card details on a tiny, fiddly form for every purchase. But in the specific case of an app, the key goals of UX are to make sure it fulfilsa need or makes solving a problem easy, is simple and pleasant to use, and is accessible to everyone.

Sounds simple, right? Can’t that be achieved without adding another process into an already complex, expensive project? Or putting the extra time and effort into finding an app development company that focuses on UX first and foremost? Well, when it comes to UX it pays (literally) to dig a little deeper.

When developing an app, it’s all too easy to create it from a standpoint of what you or your team deem as easy and pleasant to use. But, (get ready for the ‘ah-ha’ moment, guys) you are not your user.

With today’s hyper-competitive software markets and zero-commitment subscription models, it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re delivering what your customers need, in a way that makes them feel great. If not, that ‘cancel subscription’ button is going to get more clicks than you’d like.

How an App Development Company Can Use UX to Boost the ROI of your SaaS Product

Boosting user engagement

With any SaaS product, understanding what ‘good’ user engagement looks like is a huge challenge. After all, what does ‘good’ mean to your users? If they’re spending a long time on the app or navigating through a lot of pages, that could mean a) they’re enjoying the experience of using the app, or b) that they’re finding it hard to complete the job they want to do and are frustratedly clicking through multiple screens to try and solve their problem.

Effective UX seeks to develop a deep level of empathy for your users, so you understand how best to delight them. An app development company that takes UX seriously will conduct in-depth user research before building a feature to get insight into both practical things like users’ ‘jobs to do’, and deeper psychological elements. These might include things like what creates a positive experience for your users, what frustrates them, their stress responses, and why they feel the way they do when interacting with technology.

From that detailed insight, your app development company can create the conditions for users to have an experience that they perceive as positive within your app. This sets the stage for better quality user engagement, which is an essential factor for key success metrics like customer retention. But we’ll look at that in more detail later.

Increasing conversions

A staggering 70% of customers abandon purchases because of bad user experience. Ouch!

An app development company that takes a UX-first approach will use thorough research to optimise each step of the conversion journey. Simply because, if you can give people an onboarding experience that they find simple, pleasurable, and effective, they’ll assume that using your software will be equally as positive. For example, if your onboarding journey:

shows potential users exactly how the app will solve their problem or make their life easier and
how easy it is to use the key features,
then makes sign up fast and simple, and focuses on getting users using the product as quickly as possible,

you’re giving a lot of compelling reasons for visitors to become customers. So much so, that according to Forrester’s reserach, visit-to-lead conversions can be 400% higher on sites with a “superior user experience. So, by working with an app development company that focuses on creating the right conditions to maximise your conversion rate, your return on investment will consequently be boosted.

Improving brand loyalty

Once a customer has converted, you need to retain them. Obvious, yes. But worth noting, because in the SaaS game, there’s an extra consideration you should make: your customers’ needs and perceptions of value will change rapidly.

But using great feedback initiatives like feature voting, a process of asking users to vote for the features they’d like added into the next major release of your product, you can feed data insights back into the development cycle and continually improve your product in perfect alignment with your users’ value perceptions. This in turn helps you to retain them longer and enhance your ROI.

Plus, if you partner with a great app development company, they won’t treat UX as ‘one and done’. Here at Yozu, we can rely on customer feedback loops throughout your whole product life cycle, if you need it. So if your goal is to secure a sustained competitive advantage with your next software product, get in touch to find out how we can help.

Generating powerful referrals and building trust

The most powerful form of marketing, which also happens to be free, is word-of-mouth referrals and positive customer reviews. Research shows that a happy, engaged user will tell 9 people all about how great your product is, and 90% of people are more likely to trust a brand that’s been recommended. So it’s certainly worth investing in working alongside an app development company that knows how to create rave-review-worthy user experiences.

Accelerating route to market and reducing development costs

Using a process that starts with sketches, wireframing and sophisticated prototyping, a great app development company (like Yozu) will make sure your product design and user journey is planned, rationalized, and tested through early, inexpensive user feedback before development work starts. This means developers start from a solid plan, which in turn reduces expensive, time-consuming code revisions in the latter stages of the development process. So, you launch your product earlier, for less investment. Win-win, no?

Working with a UX-focussed App Development Company Pays

Working with an app development company that delivers great UX design can not only reduce the cost of your development project, but an amazing user experience also helps you to achieve sustained success with your app.

By enabling you to retain more customers (which is much cheaper than acquiring new ones), and building up a huge amount of positive word of mouth referrals through user and industry reviews, great UX maximises brand loyalty, increases conversions, and boosts your ROI.

In fact, research from Forrester shows that for every $1 invested in UX, you can expect to make between $10 and $100 in return. Now, there’s food for thought….

Ready to skyrocket the ROI for your next SaaS product, and secure its long term success? Discover more about our UX Services here – , or drop us a line to arrange a call.