It’s no secret that a good website or app user experience is crucial for boosting sales. In an offline location such as a store or restaurant, being physically present may keep a prospect even if the experience is subpar. But in an online environment, if the experience frustrates rather than delights, it will take milliseconds for the potential customer to disappear!
Now more than ever, positive user experiences are dictating how loyal and involved users are becoming with brands around the world. This means that without great design, seamless user flows, and the optimization of key customer touchpoints, a company is sure to be missing out on sales conversions and higher returns on investment. To help ensure that your UX is helping rather than hurting your brand, we’ve outlined some easy ways to improve the user experience of your digital asset and boost sales in the process. Let’s get started!
What is user experience and how does it increase sales?
Why Does UX Matter To Increase Sales?
User experience drives revenue. Poor usability pushes users away, with 60% of consumers saying they’ll abandon a purchase due to a frustrating experience. Limited payment options, clear navigation and layout, intuitive design, and seamless interactions remove the friction that stops users from completing a purchase. Put simply, good UX increases customer confidence and creates the conditions for action. It also keeps people coming back, as when users enjoy interacting with your digital product, they stay longer, convert more easily, and share their experience with others. Hence, improving and managing the user experience is good for business, as it has a direct impact on the bottom line.
What Is User Experience and How Does It Improve Sales?
UX, or user experience, is all about how your users, prospects, or customers interact with your business – from the moment they first hear about you, to the many (hopefully) happy interactions they have with your product or service, and beyond. UX encompasses every touchpoint a user has with your brand, and it’s important to make sure that each one is positive and furthers your relationship.
The Importance of Defining the Customer Journey
The touchpoints your customer has with your brand are called a customer or user journey. These journeys help create a positive user experience, which can boost sales. To serve your customers well, you need to understand their perceptions, expectations, and behaviors. Customer journeys let you map out key contact areas between customers and your brand. For example, you can track a client’s flow from landing on your pricing page to the subscription process, payment, and post-purchase emails.
Interviews and usability tests are your best sources of data for drafting customer journeys. Observing users as they go through a process provides valuable insights. If you want to know what your users do, think, and expect, watch them in action!
How Does the Customer Journey Impact Sales?
Every point of interaction influences your customer’s decision to buy. A well-defined user journey highlights where customers engage, hesitate, or fall off, which gives you the insight needed to refine those moments and increase conversion. When brands understand user behavior across the full journey, they can design experiences that guide users naturally toward completing a goal. A confusing step in the sign-up flow or a missing call-to-action on a pricing page might seem small, but these gaps create hesitation and lead to lost sales.
Customer journey insights also help prioritize resources. Instead of redesigning an entire website, you can focus on the touchpoints that influence buying behavior most directly. For example, one of our Fintech clients conducts quarterly UX studies to track shifts in user sentiment and behavior over time. Rather than rushing to change their website after each round of testing, they analyze consistent user feedback across brands to understand how the customer journey is evolving. That insight informs strategic decisions that align with user expectations and drive long-term sales performance.
Even small changes, like a redesigned newsletter pop-up, can have a measurable impact. In their case, it led to an increase in sign-up intent. Mapping the journey reveals these gaps and improving them boosts performance, creating measurable value from UX investments. Research methods like X-Second Test, First Click Testing, and heatmaps help you see the journey from the user’s perspective. That clarity supports better design decisions, stronger customer engagement, and ultimately, higher sales.
Using Data to Craft the Ultimate User Experience
Once you’ve gathered these details and designed your digital assets, like websites and apps, with your customers in mind, you can offer a much better experience. Optimising your UX leads to smoother interactions, which helps you attract and keep more customers. In short, focusing on user experience benefits your business!
As a business owner or marketer, think about how to improve UX for your customers. What can you do to enhance their experience? How can you help them find what they want more easily? By prioritizing UX and backing your brand decisions with real data from ongoing usability testing, you can encourage customers to return and bring their friends along.
What defines good UX?
It is important to recognize that good UX is never a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Dozens of impactful elements can either make or break your customers’ perceptions. Everything from the color of a single button to the layout of features and the accessibility to customer support plays a factor. While many designs do share common elements (a navigation bar at the top or left side of the screen, for example), many industries have their own layouts that would require a different understanding of their customer segments. A banking website is not expected to have a “shopping cart” in the top right corner of the website, whereas we have all come to expect that an e-commerce site will certainly have such an icon within its design. As such, it’s imperative to create a UX that is both intuitive and visually appealing for your specific consumer base, and to do so in a way that customers have come to expect.
Good UX is all about catering to your customers’ needs and limiting the amount of work they have to do to learn about your brand or purchase your product. Knowing what your customers expect and making it simple for them to achieve their goal is actually in the best interest of both you and your target user. If they can access your product and service with ease, they are more likely to move further into your sales funnel. Though if a user is met with roadblocks, barriers, or overwhelming amounts of information, they are surely going to consider that your company might not be a good fit. In some cases, they may assume that your poor UX also means poor customer service or poor management. If that is the case, you are harming your ROI, alongside your brand reputation! In contrast, if you are fully aware of who your customers are and what they want, you also have the opportunity to highlight features that are most appealing to them. You can also demonstrate key elements about your brand that separate you from your competitors!
How to Design a User-Friendly Interface for Your Product or Service?
How to Design a User-Friendly Interface for Your Product or Service?
To create a UX that is both effective and user-friendly, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:
- Understand your audience: First, it is important to understand your audience’s desires and pain points. This requires you to conduct some preliminary UX testing, such as interviews (moderated or unmoderated), usability testing, or surveying. Remember to always mix qualitative and quantitative methods in your UX tests! This will allow you to obtain a much broader understanding of your clientele.
- Keep it simple: Focus on keeping your digital asset’s design simple and intuitive.
- Be intentional: Make sure all the content you include on your digital asset is purposeful and intentional, focusing only on catering to the expectations and perceptions of your consumers.
- Be honest: Only include factual and educational information on your digital asset to demonstrate your company’s credibility. Trust is one of, if not the most definitive, factor in your customers’ decision-making process.
- Remove jargon: Remember to remove jargon that is unfamiliar to your customers. If you want to connect with them, you must speak their language.
- Keep it straightforward: Reduce the cognitive load of your users. Remove the need for them to remember minute yet important details, and allow them to focus on achieving their goal and connecting with your brand.
- Remember to test often: Finally, keep in mind that UX is an ever-evolving field; what works today may not work tomorrow. As such, it is important to continuously test and refine your UX.
By following these best practices, you can design a UX that is both user-friendly and effective.
Key Principles of High-Converting UX Design
Creating a high-converting user experience means designing every element with purpose. As a result, these principles focus on what motivates consumers to behave. Use them as a foundation for building digital experiences that convert.
1. Clarity Over Cleverness
Visitors should immediately understand what you offer and what action they should take. Use clear, benefit-driven headlines and intuitive CTAs that guide users toward conversion.
2. Prioritize the Action
Design around your primary goal. Whether it’s a purchase, a demo request, or a sign-up form, your layout should focus attention on that objective. Eliminate distractions and reduce visual noise.
3. Build for Behavior, Not Just Aesthetics
Beautiful design isn’t enough if it doesn’t support user decision-making. Make sure every element, including layout, color, and copy, moves users toward a meaningful outcome.
4. Minimize Friction
Friction is anything that makes a user hesitate. Confusing navigation, unnecessary form fields, or unclear instructions can stop a user in their tracks. Simplify wherever possible.
5. Earn Trust Visually and Functionally
Social proof, security badges, and professional design elements build credibility. So do responsive layouts, fast load times, and clean mobile experiences.
6. Guide the Journey with Intentional Structure
Treat your site like a sales conversation. Introduce value, handle objections through content, and guide users naturally to the next step with strategic placement of CTAs and supporting information.
7. Test, Measure, Refine
Finally, what doesn’t get measured can’t be improved. Use data from a range of testing methodologies, such as heatmaps, unmoderated and moderated user testing sessions, A/B testing, among others, to learn what works and continually improve the experience.
Common Mistakes in UX That Impact Sales Negatively
There are a number of common mistakes that can hurt your user experience and impact your sales negatively:
- Failing to test before launch: One of the most common mistakes is failing to properly test your site or app before launch. This can lead to a number of problems, including bugs, crashes, and poor performance. Testing early and often is of the utmost importance – it’s better to spend the money and time now, rather than having to spend it later after you’ve potentially tarnished your brand!
- Annoying pop-ups or ads: Another mistake that can hurt your user experience is using pop-ups or other intrusive ads. If you want your consumers to know something of value, it should be designed into your asset, not as an “add-on.”
- Failing to optimize for mobile: Similarly, a common issue of late is failing to offer a good mobile experience. With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to browse the web, it’s essential to have a site that looks good and works well on these devices.
- Introducing too many design elements: Lastly, a common yet catastrophic error is trying too hard to stand out by adding too many interactive elements or an abundance of fonts and color schemes. This leads to confusing navigation and can completely disrupt the user flow. More than likely, this will cause your prospect to move on to another competitor. A piece of advice – keep it simple. Think, IKEA. Minimalism and an obvious value-add go a long way. Fortunately, UX tools like card sorting and tree testing can help you avoid this blunder and create a simple, seamless website structure.
Instead of spending the resources on designing twice, use data and feedback to design right the first time!
How to Turn your UX strategy into a Sales Engine
By now, it’s clear that good UX is a catalyst for higher sales and stronger customer loyalty. But how do you transform this understanding into actionable steps? Start by gaining a deep understanding of your customer base: what motivates them, where they struggle, and what keeps them coming back. Conduct usability testing sessions to observe real user behavior and gather insights that move beyond assumptions.
Once you’ve identified your users’ needs and pain points, prioritize improvements that directly impact their journey. This could mean simplifying your checkout flow, refining navigation, or reworking content to match user expectations. Follow-up studies and A/B testing can then measure how these changes perform, helping you fine-tune your design for maximum impact.
Remember, UX is not a one-off project but a continuous process. Regular testing and iterative design ensure your site evolves with your users’ needs. A well-optimized user experience not only satisfies existing customers but also attracts new ones, turning your UX strategy into a powerful sales engine that drives growth and enhances your brand reputation.
Want more tips on improving the UX of your website, app or prototype UX? Contact us for help!
Userlytics
Since 2009 we have been helping enterprises, governmental organizations, non-profits, agencies and startups optimize their user experience, or UX. With our state-of-the-art platform, massive global participant panel and unlimited accounts/seats for democratizing user research, we are the best all-in-one solution for remote user testing.
Schedule a Free DemoRodriguez, E. July 10, 2023. How to Boost Sales with Good UX. Userlytics.
Q&A
UX is crucial for sales because it directly impacts how users interact with a product or service. A positive user experience can lead to increased customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and improved customer retention. By simplifying navigation, ensuring fast loading times, and providing clear calls to action, businesses can enhance the overall user journey, leading to more sales
UX can help marketing by creating a seamless and enjoyable experience for users, which can increase engagement and conversions. Good UX design ensures that marketing messages are effectively communicated and that users can easily navigate through the sales funnel. Additionally, a well-designed user interface can enhance brand perception and trust, making marketing efforts more effective.
UX impacts revenue by improving key metrics such as conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. A well-designed user experience can reduce bounce rates, increase the time users spend on a site, and encourage repeat purchases. Studies have shown that every $1 invested in UX can yield a return of up to $100, highlighting the significant financial benefits of prioritizing user experience.
1. Increased Conversion Rates One of the most compelling selling points of UX is its direct impact on conversion rates. By designing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, businesses can guide users through the purchasing process more effectively, leading to higher conversion rates. Improved navigation, clear calls to action, and a seamless checkout process are key factors in turning visitors into customers
