Introduction – How to leverage UX Design to help your business win
Hi. My name is Niels. I'm cofounder and head of interaction design at Dinghy, and I have 10 plus years experiences experience of building websites and digital products. And I'm here to talk to you about user experience and how it applies to your business. And I'm not talking about other agencies.
Speaker 1:I'm talking about everyone out there who has a digital product, who runs some sort of app or website or anything with users on it that use this product to accomplish something in their lives. At Dini, we we talk a lot about user experience. And just in the last couple of weeks, I had so many discussions and so many questions around how user experience actually will make you more money. Like how you can use, how how you can improve your products user experience to make your business more profitable. Then
Speaker 2:I thought I'd just use this
Speaker 1:to start a podcast. I've been thinking about it for a while and here we are. This is episode number 1. And I my promise to you is that with every episode, we're just starting out. But with every every episode, you'll learn something about how your users actually interact with your product.
Speaker 1:How you can make it better. How by making it better, you will have happier customers, will get better ratings on app stores, on trust pilot, on Google ratings, on wherever you are with your product. And in turn have more time internally to actually work on your product, because you're less hooked up with support requests because people don't understand how to use your product. And we'll talk about all of these topics. And, and I'm I hope I can help to demystify the whole topic.
Speaker 1:I'll I'm planning to have guests on the show and to have guests from business and from marketing and from other designers maybe and stuff like this. So I I have many people who are actually interested in the into who are interested
Speaker 2:to learn about the topic. And I thought, let's
Speaker 1:just do it. It's, you know, whenever whenever you start it's the good time to start. So here we are. And in in the first episode, I wanted to share with you, a blog post that my colleague, Nasifu, put together. That actually got me got me started.
Speaker 1:It was part of the reason that I started to think we need a podcast. Because I have all of these conversations with our customers, with coworkers, with friends and so on. And so she put together this blog post, called the hidden gold mine. 20 ways user testing and research saves, businesses money. This is one of our most popular blog posts on Google.
Speaker 1:By far, like we have a whole ton of blog posts, by now. But,
Speaker 2:but the one I'm sharing with you today
Speaker 1:is one of the most interesting ones. And I think let's go through the headlines really quickly. And I think those headlines are gonna be like the first couple of episodes. Because each of those seem to spark interest with
Speaker 2:people visiting our blog. We try
Speaker 1:to talk about user experience in a way that it's not, user experience is not just UI design. Like, you probably have seen posts on LinkedIn at least, I don't know. I see them where people say user experience design, UX design is not UI design. And that's true. But, like, those two disciplines are UI design is maybe one piece of user experience design.
Speaker 1:It's a little bit like user experience has, I think, the same problem. The same as brand design, for example, has a problem, for people to understand what it's actually about because it's not one activity. And that's that, like that applies to brand and that applies to user experience as well. It's not just if you have a pretty UI, then all of a sudden everybody will understand how to how to use your app. And it's also not even only about using your app.
Speaker 1:It's about actually, the literally what it says, it's about what sort of experience does a user have when they interact with your business. And there are many touch points, and I just wanna go through the headlines really quick so you have an idea of what I'll be talking about during the next couple episodes. So user experience is a way to minimize product failures. At dinghy, we incorporate usability testing and discovery research and basically talking to your users, like, from human to human in that part of the design process. So it's almost like using Figma for us, like Figma is the design tool.
Speaker 1:We come up with a concept, then we talk to someone, 3 people, 5 people, in the course of, I don't know, one day. And then we know better. And what this does every time,
Speaker 2:and I'm a designer since 10
Speaker 1:years now. Like if I have so much
Speaker 2:experience in building websites and apps and even I, have never come out
Speaker 1:of usability testing with real people where, first of all, I didn't kind of like, after talking to person number 3, you already have this feeling when you're gonna talk to person number 4, that you already know what the theme of the feedback is gonna be. You usually have one core problem in whatever you're testing. And it becomes clear so quickly that it's
Speaker 2:it's really amazing. And the second part is, I I never
Speaker 1:had a usability testing where I didn't learn something. So I never was able to anticipate
Speaker 2:the full spectrum of problems that people have when
Speaker 1:using the thing that I was testing with them. So if
Speaker 2:you ask your users quickly
Speaker 1:as early as possible in the design process, then you reduce the risk of your product failing when it actually goes live. Enhance the product market fit. For me, and that's again, part
Speaker 2:of the reason why I'm starting this podcast. If you don't talk to your users, you're probably won't hit product market fit
Speaker 1:because you don't know what the problem is that you actually solve. And the only way to find out is to talk to the people who will have the problem. It will reduce development costs. It's actually more costly to not talk to your users and to not care about the user experience because you will build one thing, then
Speaker 2:you go live, then you will get feedback, then
Speaker 1:you will probably be very sad, and then you will spend more money on development because you have to change the feature.
Speaker 2:The same goes for rebrands. Like, if
Speaker 1:if you wanna rebrand, if there's even a reason for it, like,
Speaker 2:find out first, what
Speaker 1:is even the perception of your brand? Like, what are you going for? Because the people buying from you are the one who are perceiving your brand. And that's not you or your stakeholders or your investors or anyone you know. Actually, it's only your users.
Speaker 1:The same thing goes for increased customer lifetime value. Happier users stay on longer. The improving user experience gives you better app store ratings. It increases retention of your
Speaker 2:app usage. I mean, that counts for so many things. It's like
Speaker 1:when I go through these headlines, I'm I'm just nodding along. And I hope that I can open your eyes to to why we're so passionate about this whole topic. Like, optimize marketing spend. Like, there's an absolute no brainer. Like, they can tell you a story from from last year where we built a webs we rebranded, build a new website, and started to talk about the product of, of an IOT, German IOT company, in 3 months.
Speaker 1:Like they wanna be super fast. And one of the we had an idea that we wanted to run an entire marketing campaign on. And then we luckily had access to their very specific ideal customer profile and asked, like, 2 or 3 people. And as I mentioned before, when I talked to CEO number 3, I already knew what they were gonna say. We wanted to come in and give them a calculator, like an interactive simple calculator thing, where they could find out how amazing the return on invest of this product is gonna be.
Speaker 1:And we thought that was a super smart thing. The graphic design department was already making the ads, and they were willing to spend serious money because they had acquisition goals for the end of the year. So we started in September, and they really wanted to see results by the end of the year. And we talked to the CEOs and they all every single one of them said, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Calculator. I don't know. Like I can I can, you know, whatever you're gonna tell me on your website that is the return on invest of your product? I don't believe you anyway. Show me the product first, and I can make my own calculations.
Speaker 1:So turn this whole conversation around. We didn't go online with, like, 10 k marketing budget or whatever on this messaging, but instead
Speaker 2:opted to show the products. And I think it's fair to say, we saved, like, a whole ton of money and probably had
Speaker 1:the better chances of reaching the goals just because we talked to 3 people. And sometimes it's hard to find these people of course, but it's it's just so worth it. Boost conversion rates, decrease customer support cost. I think that's even that's a huge one. Like I've seen so many start ups who have the chance to scale up and then fail because the app is so unintuitive that they they can't scale their support team as quickly as the user base.
Speaker 1:And of course, I mean, you also don't want like a 1,000 agents sitting around answering questions all the time. You want the thing to be self explanatory, and that is where user experience optimization comes in, in a way it saves you real real money. Even mitigating legal risks. Like there are so many topics in here that, I hope to go to, I don't know, to episode 100 by the end of next year or something. But, user experience is it's not a fancy design term.
Speaker 1:It's as less a fancy design term as branding is. It's, if you wanna be successful with a digital product,
Speaker 2:especially since all of the AI madness is going on, to stand out the huge avalanche of stuff that is currently hitting the Internet. To stand out of this,
Speaker 1:in a way that your users understand that you actually care about them, that you form a human connection through your digital product. I think, that will be the only way to be successful in the future, at least with a really good product. And we're gonna talk about all of these topics, like, one after the other, pricing strategies, product scalability, product returns and refunds, enhance employee efficiency, optimizing product features. There's like, there's so many things here and I'm just starting with this blog post. This will be, the topic of this podcast.
Speaker 1:And I'm very curious to hear if if you have any questions, if you if you think this topic is interesting, since it's our daily business at dinghy, I will make the podcast anyway, but I'm always happy, to receive feedback and, to go deeper into topics that I might not have on my roadmap yet. So if you wanna reach out and, and have me talk about about another topic that's somehow related to the user experience of digital products. Let me know. Also, maybe you want to come on the show and actually discuss with me. I think that would also be kind of a cool way to to get this started and to to actually work in public, like to talk about real issues that you have.
Speaker 1:And I'm happy to look on your product and point out a couple of things because there's always something. We're human, nothing is perfect, and so there's always something. And for that, I'm gonna stop before I ramble on too long, and we'll see you on the next one, next week Monday.
