“Every great design begins with an even better story!”
User Experience became a separate entity (and an important one at that!) in the field of development and design fairly recently. Since then, each UX design company has aimed to drive better human experiences and growth while a user maneuvers through an app.
All UI UX design studios compete to deliver the most functional version of the apps to their customers to ease out the journey of the end-user.
And hence, UX design has now become an essential arm for many software development companies and startups wanting to create a comfortable and attractive product. So let’s talk about UX and UX design companies in detail!
How does a UX design company contribute to increasing ROI?
While designing an app, one needs to understand that excellent visuals play a significant role in attracting new users. This can only be achieved when the UX design company deeply understands the product.
However, capturing the users’ attention is not the only result you churn out when you create a good UX. Creating a mindful UI UX design can help you with:
- Strengthening your brand image
- Improving ROI and saving your time and money
- Getting featured in the app store
Getting to know if the users dislike your app, is an intense emotion to deal with. If you inquire any user about their least favorite app, it generally boils down to these 3 points:
- It’s not straightforward, intuitive, or seamless.
- It’s slow or outdated.
- Overloaded with features
The takeaway is clear—neglecting UX isn’t an option! When the UX improves the customer experience, it positively impacts the company’s ROI (return on investment).
When UX is done accurately, the investment return rate can go as high as 301%. A good UX also improves key performance indicators by 83%, so doing extensive research before choosing the right UI UX design company is crucial.
Things To Consider While Choosing A UX Design Company
1) Testimonials, Case studies, Feedbacks
Testimonials are a sure shot way to understand the company’s credibility, and client reviews are one of the best indicators for a UX design company. If you know someone who has collaborated with the company you like, talk to them about how the agency carried out the project. You can always rely on websites like Clutch and LinkedIn to get individual ratings and feedback.
2) Past Projects
The company’s portfolio is the primary thing to consider while choosing. Looking at their past projects helps you understand a company’s work style, skillset, and approach. A few points to note of while analyzing the portfolio of a UX design company are:
- Number of projects
- Uniqueness
- Quality
- UX Research and authenticity of their study
3) UX Research Methods
Research is the first step for any process to begin. A good UX design company will always do the groundwork first. The research should be all-inclusive and starts with collecting data about the user (target audience), product, and brand. Then they would create a user’s persona to understand how the designers can create the simplest journey for them.
4) Communication & Specialization
How a UX design company communicates with you provides a clear idea of the studio’s professionalism. Ideally, an agency should show enthusiasm and determination to work with a client, and if you cannot spot that excitement, start looking for other design partners.
Apart from communication, if you want your app design to impact your audience significantly, don’t get lured for one-for-all services and stick to an expert design studio. Even if you choose a multi-service agency, ensure its primary skill set is UI UX design. Lastly, the quality and ability of the agency to deal with a vast range of subjects is also essential.
5) Task Interpretation & Project Management
As we talked about the research part, if a company wants to know the ins and outs of your project, it is a good sign. Thus, if a studio wants to understand your brand objectives and requirements before they begin fully, stick to them.
A company’s project managing skills decide how well it can handle a project. A few questions you need to ask the UX design company are:
- Will they deliver the final design as per schedule?
- Frequency of the progress update regarding the project?
- Prerequisites of the company?
By asking these, you can get a vague idea of a company’s management skills and how often they communicate.
Also Read – How to hire the perfect UI UX Designer for your company
Process That A Good UX Design Company Follows
The UI/UX design process can be segregated into 5 phases.
The steps involved in this are:
-
Outlining The Product Based On User Requirements
In this first step, the team gathers the user requirements based on their business environment. It’s essential because understanding the product’s scope and its sustainability in the market happens in this step. Initially, you need to enlighten the UI UX designers as they need to understand the product and how it will solve the problem of the end-user.
Consider this step as an initiation conversation and discussion that happens in the beginning of any project. The departments that get involved here are the design team, business heads, and product managers, and the team involved from the UX design company should inquire about the client’s approach.
The significant outcomes of this step are defining user personas and user stories, with some use case diagrams.
-
Research
The most crucial element for any UX design company is research. A designer cannot proceed with the designs if the product lacks robust primary research. The team studies how the present system works for the current client proposal. The main functions at this stage are:
- A thorough study of the business
- Establishing how the product or service can solve a user’s problem
- In-depth analysis of the competition
- Understanding competitor strategy to test outcomes.
- Understanding the latest UI/UX trends, design principles, and guidelines.
-
Analysis
In this step, we use the data collected while researching. With the help of that information, hypothetical personas and experience maps are created.
- Hypothetical Personas: Creating theoretical scenarios help the designers understand the various pain points of the user. It creates a story and displays a realistic representation of the ultimate product.
- Experience Maps: These maps show the user flow within the final product. Experience maps are created using visual representations during the outlining product phase based on the discussions with the client.
-
Design
Finally, the designers give life to the ideas and work on the final graphics. The team of your chosen UX design company executes the final designs of the product in this phase.
The significant outcomes of this phase are:
- Wireframes: A wireframe is a visual structure that displays the page hierarchy and elements in the product. It is considered the backbone of the product. In app design, these are the black and white designs act as an overview of the whole app and what the screens will look like, right from the sign-up process to the check-out.
- Creating Prototypes: This part is focused on the feel of the product that the UX design company is creating. It’s more about the interaction experience.
- Creating Design Specifications: These include user flow and task flow diagrams. It defines the processes and graphical elements to create an amazing user experience.
-
Validation or User Testing
Usability testing is a technique for evaluating a website’s, app’s, or other digital product’s user experience by testing it with real users, giving them tasks to perform, and watching them interact with it. The testing may be conducted on a website,mobile app or a design prototype.
The main objective of usability testing is to determine how user-friendly a website/app is, what parts of it are confusing for the end-user, and how easy it is to accomplish their goals with the product.
Why is usability testing necessary?
- Find out how an end-user interacts with your product
- To discover where and why users get confused
- To uncover usability and design issues, improve them and boost conversions
- Save money and time on fixing issues later on
There are primarily two approaches to usability testing:
- Moderated: Requires a presence of a UX researcher to guide users through the whole testing process, give tasks and follow their behavior.
- Unmoderated: This is a much cheaper way of testing that can be conducted anywhere, anytime, with no researcher present. A user is completing tasks without intervention, while an online tool is observing the responses and gathering data.
Unmoderated testing requires an online tool to perform the study. They offer deep analytics and help you to streamline the process of testing. There are many Usability Testing Guides , which explain the process step-by-step and can help you set up your own Usability Testing study.
Conclusion- Impact of UI UX
The effect of investment in user experience projects is measurable and can be directly connected to revenues when measured correctly. Hence it is pertinent to comprehend its impact.
As the first steps, a UX Design company knows how to measure and present UX activities’ return on investment (ROI) that helps introduce UX into enterprises. And when the figures add up, the investment in UX becomes easy.
Hence, before hiring the design agency of your choice, you must do your research in-depth, just how they do their user research!
