UX design: why and how can you incorporate it into your business strategy?

In a world where technology takes centre stage, user experience (UX) has become a strategic lever for businesses. User experience design (UX design) has many benefits, going beyond simple aesthetic considerations. This approach can transform an interaction into a memorable and impactful experience. So how do you put UX design in its rightful place, and why invest in it? How can you integrate it into your business strategy? Gwenaël Bony, freelance UX designer, consultant and corporate trainer, explains.

Have you ever been seduced by a digital product purely because of the emotions it arouses? That's the magic of sensory design, which focuses on the user experience. Every detail, every interaction becomes a source of pleasure, reinforcing your perception of quality and your loyalty. Conversely, mediocre design can quickly put you off.

Tech giants such as Apple, Google and Tesla have done much to popularise user experience design. This has contributed to the belief that UX design is only for large B-to-C companies. What's more, the frequent confusion between UX and UI design reinforces the idea that it's all about superficial aesthetics.

However, UX design goes far beyond mere "cosmetics" and obvious good practice. This misperception has often led to its importance being overlooked in the B-to-B, industrial and smaller business sectors.

So what is user experience?

Every time you interact with a product or service, or discover a place, you have an experience. This experience is sensory and emotional, and can be more or less positive and memorable. It begins before you interact with the interface and continues long afterwards.

As a UX designer, before launching any project, I ask myself three questions.

To answer these fundamental questions, you need to ask yourself some others:

• Who are you designing this experience for?
• Do you understand their objectives, needs, expectations and motivations?
• What do you know about what they're doing and what they're creating now?
• Do you take their frustrations and concerns into account?
• Do you know the context and environment in which it will be used?

Imagine not only being able to check the value of your offerbut also anticipate how it will be received by your audience by understanding what will influence it. This is precisely the objective of UX design.

UX design methods and tools enable you to optimise the entire user experience.

In practical terms, what's in it for you?

Acquisition, retention, loyalty

An attractive, functional product is not enough to guarantee success and profitability. To achieve these objectives, a number of crucial factors need to be aligned:

• The need : will the user see any value in it?
• Feasibility : do you have the means to do so, or is the value acquired greater than its cost?
• The opportunity: Does a relevant offer already exist? Can you do better?
• Confidence: Do you share common values and convictions with your audience and do you have sufficient expertise and authority? What is your reputation?

Investing in UX design offers a major strategic advantage.

It attracts qualified customers, builds loyalty and turns them into enthusiastic ambassadors. These customers identify with the company, sharing its values, codes and a positive experience.

What about business software and industry?

Even constrained users remain sensitive to their emotions. UX design becomes crucial when :

• The user is not very receptive to the interface
• The task lacks meaning or perceived value
• Performance depends as much on design as on user skills

In these situations, a good design of the user path and functionality is proving to be a major asset in improving employee engagement and efficiency.

Understanding tasks and business processes, and having an overview of all stakeholders, helps teams to design interfaces that are useful, usable and desirable.

We need to stop piling up functions that are loosely structured around access rights.

The synergy between business expertise and experience design optimises the framing of projects by prioritising the creation of value from the user's point of view. Integrating technical teams into the creative process at an early stage encourages the development of rational, scalable systems and a fair allocation of resources.

This proactive approach, guided by a clear vision, is the opposite of a reactive approach dictated solely by customer demands or commercial objectives.

In short, there are a number of potential benefits:

• On time and on budget making it easier to prioritise the functionalities to be developed
• Reduced maintenance costs and updating by a coherent and integrated system
• Reduced learning curve and cognitive load users by improving ergonomics and accessibility
• User autonomy and a reduction in the number of calls for technical assistance
• Improving performance and user engagement
• Image enhancement and the company's reputation

Not everything can be measured in monetary terms

Business leaders often try to quantify the return on investment (ROI) of UX design. Although certain studies suggest an impressive ROI of 9,900 % ($100 return for every $1 invested), this purely financial view is reductive. It's a good idea to take into account the company's other objectives.

The priorities of your contacts can vary considerably. For some, money is essential, while others focus on impact, perception or retention.

In the same way, your customers' motivations are not all the same. They may be financial, but they may also follow personal emotional criteria, such as serenity or fun, or social emotional criteria, such as pride or belonging to a group.

How can you integrate UX design into your business strategy?

The first step is to change the corporate culture. Raise awareness and make it easier to understand, before providing training.

If there is no support and buy-in from top management and managers, UX design skills will not flourish in your company.

It should be noted that it is only fair to talk about UX design when the mock-ups and prototypes created by the designers are based on upstream user research (surveys, interviews, field studies, etc.) and/or when frequent and regular usability tests are carried out to continuously improve the interface and functionalities. UX and UI are intimately linked and interdependent.

To sum up, what is needed for a company wishing to integrate UX design into its operations is :

• Involve stakeholders when planning a project
• Allocate a budget, time and qualified staff for finding information about users, their needs and tasks
• Follow an iterative design process, which advances by testing proposals before validation (user tests)
• Facilitating active collaboration between designers, business experts, developers and business managers
• Training teams at least the fundamentals of UX design

Ultimately, when UX design is fully integrated into the corporate culture, its implementation is no longer perceived as a cost, but as a sound investment that gives meaning to design and development work.