Not Just a Pretty Site: How Wow-Worthy Companies Leverage UX Design to Get Ahead

As a budget-conscious business leader, you are looking for software with results. Results that save time and resources and add value to your business. To do that, your software product needs to be conceptually on target with your business goals and structured to achieve strategic objectives. It needs to be coded perfectly–no glitches, no slow-to-load views, no broken functions. And that’s it, right?

According to most standards, if your software product delivers in those areas, then you are set to win. But what if getting the job done is no longer good enough? What if you need to “wow” users in order to really win?

>> Our UX design services could give you an unfair advantage.

Believe it or not, cutting edge research and up-to-date case studies on the most successful technology products reveal that competitive user experience design is actually the differentiator that matters most in highly-evolved markets today.

Why UX Design Is Crucial to Gaining Competitive Advantage

When some business leaders think about design, they think about a superficial, sometimes fluffy “extra” for their product or service. Design is an optional piece of the puzzle. And it’s easy to believe that. After all, countless companies have seen great success without paying much attention to user experience design. So what’s the problem?

It’s not so much a problem as it is an opportunity. To illustrate the role of user experience design in a competitive landscape, let’s take a look at the evolution of a market.

There are three phases of market progression:

1. Technology – A new product is developed and introduced.
2. Feature wars – A competitor arises with the same technology. The companies begin competing for customers by adding features and making the product better.
3. Commoditization – Another competitor comes along with a similar product that isn’t choosing to compete on features, but on experience and design instead.

The third phase is climactic. It occurs when a company in the market chooses to no longer focus on the features of the product. Instead, this company shifts its focus onto the experience, the end-to-end perspective of how users engage with their product, ushering the market into the commoditization stage. At this stage, quality is no longer a concern–quality has been achieved. Competition has advanced and improved the product to the point that new features are not needed or even wanted.

In the commoditization stage of a market, the company that offers the most frictionless user experience through competitive user experience design is the one that will win.

Software Designed with the User in Mind

At Praxent, we strive to create software that allows you to win, even at the level of commoditization. To do so, we focus on delivering the following:

• Software that WORKS
• Software that WINS
• Software that WOWS

We haven’t always defined success in this way. For much of our existence as a company, we’ve been driven primarily by the desire to deliver software that works incredibly well and scales your business 2x, 3x, up to 10x.

What changed? We’ve picked up on the fact that those companies who can begin designing their product or service with frictionless user experience in mind early on will change the rules of the game and beat the competition before it even gets started.

And that’s what we like to call competitive advantage.

A World Without Friction

Take a look at the Disney MagicBand. It’s a wearable that doesn’t tell time, track your heart rate or count your steps. What it does do is create a frictionless experience for guests of the Walt Disney World Resort. The bands contain RFID radios that allow the resort to connect each guest with personalized data related to their stay, such as parking and lodging logistics, food preferences, and much more.

Foremost expert on user experience, Jared Spool, illustrates the importance of Disney’s wearable plastic bracelet in a podcast episode called “Beyond the UX Tipping Point.” According to Jared, the MagicBand is a shining example of competitive user experience design. After all, the band itself wasn’t that costly to make. It’s the end-to-end experience that Disney built across the entire resort, literally gutting the old system to create a new one. The entire infrastructure of Disney’s resort is now working to lead guests through a magical journey customized to each of their individual tastes, preferences and experiences.

The result? $805 million in one quarter and a 9% increase in hotel occupancy.

Competitive User Experience Design: Wow to Win

If other businesses in your space are focused on giving customers just enough to gain a slight edge on the competition, it’s time for you to take the market by storm. Why not step out of your current competitive paradigm and start designing for user experience? The future is full of a world of convenient technological devices that anticipate what we want before we want it. Get a jump start on the trends by setting a new standard for user experience. After all, you can’t win unless you wow.