Your market research was spot on. Your marketing messages are testing well. Your paid ads are working and your website has a killer funnel. Still, your conversion rate is below par. Does this problem sound familiar? In the post-pandemic era, many businesses are paying exorbitant fees to acquire new customers for their websites, web apps, or apps.
Even after investing in SEO, email marketing, upsells, subscriptions, and other digital marketing efforts, they fail to attract traffic. Why? Because they underestimate the benefits of hiring UI UX designers. In this article, we will explain why hiring a web design agency could be a critical brand differentiator for businesses in 2023. Before that, let us clarify what a UI/UX design agency is.
What is a UI/UX Design Agency?
UI/UX is often thought of as a single term. In reality, UI and UX design are two completely different aspects of the web/app design process.
User Interface (UI) refers to the visual design of a website/application. A UI designer can boost the quality, quantity, and effectiveness of the user interactions on your site by:
- Making your site design user-centric
- Using a consistent design throughout the site, i.e., using the same brand colors, fonts, layouts, etc.
- Using whitespace effectively.
- Adding high-quality images, animations, and videos to make the site relevant and visually appealing.
UI designers also track user behavior to identify areas where their interface designs can be improved.
User Experience (UX) design is more focused on creating immersive user experiences on websites/apps. Is the website easy to navigate? Does it load fast? Does it load well on all devices? These are some of the questions professional UX designers address to help brands deliver wholesome experiences to their website/app users.
Agencies that employ both professional UX and UI designers and provide both of these services are called UI UX design agencies. Now that we have cleared that up, here are the practical benefits of hiring UI UX designers and working with a UI UX design agency in 2023:
Benefits of Hiring a Web Design Company
Cut Down Development and Design Costs
Professional UI/UX designers specialize in creating agile apps or website interfaces. All components on these agile interfaces are optimized to interact smoothly with users. That means the chances of your website/app delivering bad end-user experiences can be severely minimized by professional UI/UX designers. Fewer mistakes mean less cost.
Professional UI/UX designers can initiate cost reductions at every stage of your website or app development process. For example, let’s say you are creating a new website from scratch.
Here’s how a top UI/UX designer will reduce project costs at each stage of the development and design process:
Stage I: Identifying the goals behind the website
Clearly define your target audience and their requirements to your UI/UX designers. They can help you avoid ideas, functionalities, and plans that may unnecessarily drive up project costs.
Stage II: Defining the Scope of the Project
At this stage, UI/UX designers clearly define the deliverables, timelines, and the overall scope of the project to avoid unnecessary costs and confusion.
Stage III: Sitemap and Wireframe Creation
UI/UX designers can create a detailed sitemap and wireframe using free tools like Figma or Sketch to reduce costs. They will also visualize the structure, visual hierarchy, and overall layout of the website by this stage.
Stage IV: Content Creation
UI/UX designers are in-tune with customer needs and requirements. They can guide your website content creation strategies and add value to your content through efficient design. Eliminating errors from your content strategy is much easier when you have professional UI/UX designers overlooking each step.
Stage V: Visual elements
UI/UX designers use the most effective visual elements to make websites stand out. They use free stock photos and low-cost software tools to keep costs down in this stage of development.
Stage VI: Testing
UI/UX designers minimize the risk of finding expensive errors during functionality testing, usability testing, database testing, and other types of product tests. Avoiding mistakes like having a poorly configured navigation layout or a non-responsive web design going into the testing stage helps save a lot of time and money.
Stage VII: Post-Launch Maintenance
UI/UX designers will provide ongoing maintenance and design support to keep your website up-to-date, secure, and free from costly errors.
A good UI/UX design agency will uncover potential design and user experience-related issues long before they become expensive problems!
Boosting Your Brand Value
Many digital marketers, SEO specialists, and UI/UX designers claim that they can boost the “brand value” of any business. But, what does that mean? In a design context, it means a lot of things. With a well-crafted UI/UX design, your website/app can be more accessible to users. It can provide better user experiences and improve user engagement rates. All of that is typically followed by higher conversion rates.
Here are some subtle techniques professional UI/UX designers apply to achieve these goals:
Improving the Readability of Website Content
Well-presented and readable content engages existing users and may draw additional visitors to your site. Professional UI designers will ensure that key brand-related messages are clearly communicated on your website. They use easy-to-read typefaces, eye-catching fonts, and strategic content placement techniques to achieve these goals. Combine effective user interface design with strategic UX research and you have the perfect content strategy for your website!
Creating Awesome Landing Pages
Here is a good example of a well-designed landing page. Even if you are not interested in the products/services this page is advertising, you can at least appreciate its design. That is what UI/UX design experts do. They infuse creativity, user-friendliness, and visual appeal into all sections of apps and websites, including the landing pages. Well-designed landing pages can elevate your brand’s perceived value among the masses!
Fill Up Your Website with Appealing CTA Buttons
“Buy now!” “Sign up now!” “Register your email now!” These types of messages may overwhelm your target users. Presenting them as finely crafted design elements is the best way to avoid that threat. That is what professional design agencies do: transform simple, business-centric sites into cool and well-branded digital platforms.
Make All Interactions on Your Website Fun
Both UI and UX designers leverage animation, motion graphics, and other visual tools to make their digital products more engaging. In the example above, you can see how micro animations can make simple website sections appear engaging.
Improving Navigation
Professional UI designers will ensure that users can easily navigate from one webpage to the next on your website. These pros specialize in creating consistent content flows by:
- Optimizing each design element for both mobile and PC users
- Consistently improving the website load time metrics
- Creating hierarchical content structures to guide users into taking specific steps
- Maintaining a balance between text and whitespace in all the content pages to increase readability
- Ensuring frictionless interactions on the site
The cumulative result of taking these steps is undeniable brand growth. Any website or app with a well-tuned interface and a user-friendly layout is guaranteed to attract more traffic and impress more customers.
Improved Back-End Flexibility
Back-end work is not something UI/UX designers are known for. But backend developers often have to collaborate with UI/UX designers to create convenient and accessible website/app frameworks. Together, they create flexible backends that are easy to edit and update. Here are some other ways UI/UX designers make the jobs of backend developers easier:
- Using well-designed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to simplify the process of adding new features or adjusting existing ones. Backend developers do not have to make big changes to the existing backend code.
- UI/UX designers use modular designs so that new modules can be added to the app/website without changing the rest of the existing code.
- Using a scalable architecture to ensure the app/website can handle increasing traffic without becoming overwhelmed.
- Using a test-driven development (TDD) design approach to maintain the flexibility of the backend code.
Leveraging User Feedback
New-age UX design experts use the live app and website tracking tools to gather meaningful user data in real time. They use this data to help businesses improve every aspect of their digital products, not just the UX design. Of course, the main goal of collecting user data is to make consistent improvements in the app/website UX design.
But that is not the only way UX designers can improve your marketing KPIs. The research they conduct can provide helpful insights into pretty much every aspect of your digital presence.
Final Take
In 2023, investing in UI/UX design services is the easiest way to make your app/website frictionless for users. The lesser friction your users experience, your odds of converting them into customers increase significantly. Investing in UI/UX design services is also the cheapest way to mitigate the ever-rising costs of customer acquisition in this day and age.
Most importantly, investing in UI/UX design services means investing in the digital experiences your brand provides to customers. If these experiences are positive and ever-improving, your brand value will grow without a doubt!
Originally posted on design-studio.io.
What Are the Benefits of Hiring a Professional Web Design Company was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.