Why Entrepreneurs Need User Experience (UX) Design: What It Is and Why It’s Important
Hey entrepreneurs, I see you there! You’re here because you’ve heard of User Experience (UX) Design, but maybe you’re not sure what it is or if and why you need it in your business.
Spoiler alert: a good user experience is absolutely critical for the success of your business!
You invested a ton of energy into your brand, your marketing, your offers, your products, your services, etc. But if you fail to provide a good user experience for your audience, those efforts will go to waste because the trust in your brand and business will tank.
In this article, I’ll walk you through:
What User Experience (UX) Design is
Why User Experience Design is especially important for you as an entrepreneur
What the broad field of UX involves
How approaching your business with a design mindset can benefit you
Keep reading to learn how User Experience Design can help you improve your business as an entrepreneur!
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What Is User Experience Design?
User Experience Design can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Most literally, UX Design is the research and intentional design of the entire experience that your audience (aka your “user”) will go through when interacting with your company.
This incredibly succinct definition of User Experience by UX gods Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen covers the topic beautifully:
User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
UX Design in your business will help you make well-researched and data-driven decisions and business flows so that the entire experience with your brand’s ecosystem will be:
Useful
Usable
Desirable
Valuable
Findable
Accessible
Credible
(as defined and designed by UX expert Peter Morville in his industry-known UX honeycomb layout).
The User Experience Honeycomb
So what do each of these mean, in particular for an entrepreneur?
User Experience is Useful
The product or service you create should be useful. It should solve your customers’ problems and pain points in a transformational way.
Your User Experience Should Be Usable
Yes—this is different from “useful.” When you create your crazy-awesome online course, ebook, or lead magnet, is your content going to be usable and digestible in a way that’s helpful for your audience?
For example, if you created a really valuable PDF lead magnet packed with tons of tips, but your end user is going to be trying to read through it on her iPhone, then the product won’t be readable because the font size might be too small. A password-protected webpage with readable text might be a better solution for your audience.
Good User Experience is Desirable
For you brand guideline nerds, desirability is where your brand visuals come into play. Images, brand identity, and other elements of design will help your audience enjoy using your product and interacting in your ecosystem, because they can feel your brand throughout the entire process.
Make Sure Your Stuff is Findable
Do you want your offer to be buried on your hugely long homepage? No. Your main CTA’s should be easily discoverable, so they can be found easily by your audience. For example: if you want your audience to download a free workbook and sign up for your email list, you will want to make sure this offer is visible and clear.
Is Your Site Accessible?
Our websites, products, services, and other offers should be accessible to all. Accessibility in User Experience Design helps to make sure that your content can be consumed by everyone—people with disabilities (hard of seeing, hard of hearing, or physical-motor disabilities, and more).
Prioritizing inclusivity in your business isn’t just an ethical thing to do; pretty soon accessibility will be the law. As entrepreneurs, it’s important to stay on the cutting edge of all things legal in the online space.
A Good User Experience Will Make You More Credible
Y’know how you spent all that time and money on a killer logo, a beautiful website, and stellar copywriting that helps people relate to you and sells your offer like hotcakes? User Experience is both the solid foundation of those visual building blocks, as well as the roof on top.
Your great site, logo, and copy won’t go far if your user experience is horrible.
A good user experience will help make you and your business more credible, which means it will help build trust with your customers and will also make them more likely to become brand advocates.
Deliver a Valuable Experience
In your business, you already know that your main mission, if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, is to provide value to your community. Consider User Experience to help you provide value in a similar but related way:
With valuable, to-the-point content
With an excellent customer service aspect
Provide an experience with peak performance
Why User Experience Design Will Benefit You As An Entrepreneur
Now that we have a better understanding of User Experience Design, let’s talk about how it directly affects you as an entrepreneur.
To flesh out the definition of User Experience Design above, here’s how UX can be defined for an entrepreneur:
By considering your ideal client avatar’s interaction with your company and your brand, user experience thinking helps you think of all the touchpoints that your customer may have with your services and offers. This includes things like:
Initial marketing touchpoints, like blog posts, social media posts, paid ads, watching a YouTube video, etc.
What it really feels like for them to click that link in bio
How easy it is for them to take that next step: sign up for your lead magnet, join your community, get on your waitlist, etc.
What the emails look and feel like after that initial interaction: are they on-brand? Do they remember why they’re getting the email? Do they remember who you are? Do you bombard them with pitches right away, or do you nurture them first?
If they click on a link in your welcome email series, does that experience look and feel harmonious with how they’ve interacted with you thus far?
Are they getting more value from you, and are they primed for further engagement with your brand? Or are they looking to unsubscribe and unfollow you right away?
When they get a sales pitch from you, are they excited or turned off?
If they purchase your product or service, is the experience of digesting your content or booking further calls with you seamless—or is it clunky and unpredictable?
When they’re going through your offer, are they excited about it and are inspired to share on social media? Or are they looking for ways to get a refund?
After they’ve digested your offer, are they satisfied? Are they going to continue to follow you, and maybe purchase from you at a higher tier down the road?
This is only one way of looking at the entire User Experience of your customer from a sales funnel standpoint.
User Experience design for entrepreneurs and sales funnels: How to go from initial click to long lasting love
One thing I see too often as a User Experience designer is that entrepreneurs will create an offer and then have “mic drop” syndrome: they’ll launch to an empty room and then wonder why they aren’t making more sales or gathering more excitement around their product or service.
You can begin to see how a solid User Experience for your entrepreneurial endeavors will help you provide a seamless and enjoyable flow for your ideal customer.
What the Broad Field of User Experience Design Involves
“User Experience Design” often gets mistaken for just visual design. Let me make it clear: User Experience Design is much more than just visual design!
The field of UX Design is broad, and involves everything below (plus a ton more). I’ve included a brief definition of each so that you can see how these terms blend with you as an entrepreneur:
Project management: User Experience designers are all about project management. This helps you boost your efficiency, productivity, and organization so that you can launch more and stay in your zone of genius.
User research: You’ve heard of and done your market research, right? User Experience designers will go further and dig through the main pain points of your audience, and talk to them about what a viable solution would look like. A solid research phase saves you tons of time and money instead of shooting in the dark and guessing what your ideal customers may want or need.
Information architecture: This applies to your website mostly. Is it easy for website visitors to find what they need? Does your site structure make sense? Can someone buy your offer with ease?
User interface, interaction, accessibility, and visual design: These 4 types of design encompass what your ideal customer sees. For a good visual User Experience, your entrepreneurial ecosystem should be on-brand visually, but should also be easy to use and accessible to all. Some questions you might want to ask yourself: Is your font readable? Is the motion on your site distracting or helpful? Are all those pop-ups really necessary (guess what—no… but that’s for another post entirely).
Content strategy: As a designer with a heavy focus in copywriting, I can easily say that content and copy are one of the most important things for a solid User Experience with your brand as an entrepreneur. This is your voice put into written words. It needs to be consistent, both in terms of tone and your content calendar. It should feel familiar across all platforms, whether that’s on your blog, on your social media, on a YouTube channel, on a podcast, etc.
Web analytics: This is the other, more data-driven side of user research. By diving into your site’s analytics, you can find out how a person discovers a certain webpage, how much time they stay on a certain page, and what action they take next. Getting familiar with your audience’s behavior on your site will help you make informed decisions about the content and visuals of your site.
How Approaching Your Business with a Design Mindset is Beneficial
Put simply, design is the act of creating an intentional solution to a problem.
When you dig deeper, you’ll find that approaching your business with a design mindset is crucial for you as an entrepreneur.
User Experience Design will help you:
Better understand your customers
Provide a better brand experience
Have people have positive feelings associated with your brand
Sell more
Build brand authority
Create brand advocates
… did I mention sell more?
The underlying thing that entrepreneurs have in common? They all want to serve others in a niche they’re passionate about… and make money doing so.
Thinking about the holistic experience from initial click to long-lasting love will help you do just that so you can spread your message in a people-centric way: with a solid user experience so you can build trust and be seen as a subject matter expert.
The money will naturally follow.
Was your mind churning as you read this article? Did you take notes? Take a pic of you reading this post and share it to your IG stories, and tag me @hello.brio!
If you’re ready to hammer down your User Experience for your entrepreneurial sales funnel, get in touch with me for a transformational 4-week endeavor.
Cover photo by Danielle MacInnes
