14 Impressive UX Statistics to Prove the Value of Great Design

Just so you know, your redesign might not get all the applause you're expecting.

There’s a particular tiny little part of the human brain called the amygdala that is responsible for resisting redesigns. It reacts to unexpected changes as a danger and releases stress hormones into your body. So unless your redesign makes your Facebook feed chronological by default or introduces something that makes people say "FINALLY", they will hate it.

But we are here to help. At Eleken, we have redesigned dozens of SaaS apps over the last seven years. We’ve watched how other companies, big and small, implement redesigns, learned from their mistakes and now are willing to share this knowledge with you so you can avoid such pitfalls in the future.

Mistake #1: focusing on competitors

The tech market can be quite intimidating with all these startups popping up like mushrooms after rain and quickly becoming unicorns. In 2022, there were almost 900 unicorn startups worldwide and their total value exceeded $3.5 trillion. So even if you have a strong and steadily growing SaaS product, the competition still might feel a bit disturbing. 

Still, it doesn’t mean that you have to turn your product into a Frankenstein, adding as many features from your competitors as possible. This is exactly what happened with Skype in 2017 when Microsoft decided to make the app more “competitive” and appealing to the audience. 

The new redesign made Skype much more colorful and introduced Stories, making the app look and feel more like Snapchat. Other new features included bots and add-ins and were obviously inspired by Facebook Messenger. 

Did the audience like it? Not really. A year after, Microsoft had to roll back the redesign, ditching most of the updates. Turned out that people valued their good old Skype for free chats, phone, and video calls, and didn’t use new features much. 

What can we learn from this? Focusing too much on competitors might result and implementing unnecessary features instead of improving what can become better is not the best strategy to follow. So even if you find a feature everyone likes in Snapchat, Instagram, whatever, it doesn’t necessarily mean your audience could use it in your app. 

Furthermore, sometimes being different can become one of your biggest advantages. This is just the case of one of our clients, Gridle — a CRM system for freelancers and small agencies. Instead of copying what their competitors do, they decided to focus on what helps them stand out, which was targeting small businesses and offering a very simple CRM user experience. In collaboration with Eleken Gridle managed to redesign their system and find their loyal audience that didn’t like complicated CRM systems.

Mistake #2: lack of communication during the redesign

Remember that part when we told you people dislike changes? Well, it’s still possible to soften the blow of audience reaction by:

• introducing new features to end users before implementing them;
• explaining why you decide to implement them;
• telling how these features would improve the user experience. 

On the other hand, lack of communication can result in misunderstanding, user disappointment, and, consequently, decreased engagement. One of the most prominent examples of that is Twitter and its infamous design updates. 

Instead of presenting the long-awaited editing button, Twitter decided to surprise users with a new custom font, a high contrast color scheme, and new button colors. High contrast was probably the worst idea, since the high contrast is quite harmful for users, especially the ones who suffer from chronic migraines. This is a clear example of what can happen when you don’t talk to end-users and think you know what they want better.

After learning from Twitter's mistake, we at Eleken focused on communication when introducing a brand new feature to the student engagement app Enroly. While the app itself was a great solution, its workspace lacked navigation tips. Introducing a new feature, a complex dashboard, could potentially add to the user confusion, so we decided to use tooltips to explain the updates to the audience – and it worked well!

Mistake #3: not planning for scalability

It’s hard to predict if your SaaS product will succeed when you launch it. Still, you have to plan it with success in mind to know what to add to your MVP once your project starts growing. 

When you don’t plan for scalability right from the start, it could become difficult to add new features, optimize user flows, and improve UI, especially if you don’t have the budget for that in the near future. For instance, Instagram wasn’t prepared to face such rapid growth, crossing the mark of 100,000 users after only six days after release. This resulted in performance issues that could potentially be avoided.

At Eleken, we faced the same issue when working with Acadeum, an eLearning app for students and educational institutions. When Acadeum turned to us, they already had two versions of the app, one for students, and one for the college admins. As they were focusing on two target audiences at once and were scaling quickly, the number of support tickets kept increasing, and so the improvements in the design had to be made.

The student app has been already fixed and updated by the company in-house designer. However, they needed someone from the outside to redesign the admin app while maintaining the same look and feel the student app had, improve the questionable user flows and deliver an updated app within three months. This was a challenge that we were willing to take and the result left both us and our client deeply satisfied.

Mistake #4: not aligning the redesign with existing resources

Sometimes it’s simply impossible to resist the temptation to make your solution more modern and add some bells and whistles during the redesign to make the solution look more impressive. After all, developers can implement it in any case, right?

Not quite. Most often developers have to write custom code to implement certain design decisions. Depending on the decisions, this could be quite easy and affordable in some cases, and complex and costly in others.

While this might not seem like a problem to companies with enough financial and technical resources to spare, it might become a burden to startups and small companies that don’t have such big budgets and teams. 

But even in this case, a smart redesign approach can save the day. When we faced a similar situation with Gamaya’s redesign, we decided to give up custom elements to make the solution more budget-friendly for the client. Instead, we used ready-made components. This didn’t make Gamaya less appealing to the target audience, but helped the client to optimize resources.

Mistake #5: not testing with end users

What is the simplest way to find out if people like your redesign? Ask them to try it. Testing not only helps to identify issues and bugs before the improved version is released but also helps understand if your users will find it easy to use.

This is what Dropbox neglected when they were updating their Plans page. Here how it looked after the update:

As you can see, Dropbox added some color and a cute illustration. It seemed that nothing could go wrong. But users’ reaction proved different. After a short period of time Dropbox noticed that several of its performance metrics dropped and changes in design were behind this drop.

In the end, it seems that the color choice negatively affected the page’s performance, so the team had to redesign.

And here’s an example that proves that user testing is worth it. One of our clients, SEO Crawl, treated testing very seriously and showed each redesigned screen to their customers. This helped validate the improvements and ensure user satisfaction. Although people usually dislike massive redesigns that make a product less familiar, in this case SEO Crawl gained a fresh, more modern look that received very good feedback from users.

Don't forget who you're redesigning for

Even though people are biologically wired to resist changes, there still are ways to overcome this phenomenon. All the mistakes described above lead to one clear conclusion: if you redesign without talking to end users, it's not worth it. So, find out what irritates your audience in the existing version of a product. What is okay but not good enough? Do they want these brand new features that you plan on introducing or not?

Addressing users' triggers and pains will help you overcome the initial redesign resistance. Because while people dislike changes, they also like when their problems are solved.

Eleken can make your redesign experience more productive and definitely less intimidating. Contact us for a free consultation and let’s make people's lives better together!

Part of the job of a UX professional is to prove the business value of user experience to executives. That is not to say that executives deny the importance of UX: most of them understand it, but at the same time, they need metrics to support it. UserZoom survey from 2021 has shown that 81% of executives recognize the value of UX, but only 59% of them claim that they can effectively measure it.

There are no direct statistics that would show how much resources you should invest in UX to see an increase in revenue. However, there is some other data that explains how good or bad user experience can impact the product — from user engagement to conversions.

Eleken is a pragmatic design agency. This means that we aim to make our design more than just good-looking. We want it to work for business goals, and make users fall in love with the product. Real-world data is what proves that design has an impact, andnot just an aesthetic one. Here we have a list of recent UX statistics that show the difference that design makes.

The stats are important to prove a statement: that’s why we start with arguments.

Design is what creates the first impression

1. On the list of the most useful website features, the leading ones are related to design. 94% of people say that easy navigation is the most important, while 83% believe that a beautiful/updated appearance on a website is also a must.

Navigation is what UX designers do, and beautiful appearance is the job of UI designers. So, if you want to impress people at the first glance, this is not possible without good design.

UX is worth investing in

2. On average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return, as stated in the research by Forrester (2016). Even if the numbers have changed since then, the ROI of UX is still very impressive.
3. The same research states that good UI can increase conversion rates by up to 200%, and good UX can double this — up to 400%. Conversion rate is one of the most straightforward metrics, so you can approximate the revenue increase that investments in UI/UX design can generate.

Design (does not) have a strong impact on users’ buying decisions

4. If you ever search for statistics related to UX design, you would surely find data like 2021 Gartner research found that 58% of customers claim that most digital experiences don’t have an influence on their buying decisions. That seems to go against all that we would expect, right?

What happens is that in 2021 people already got tired of constant attempts of digital products to “provide a unique experience”. That experience is probably not that unique, and what is really important now is to make things work well. When performing their everyday tasks people might not need "unique experiences". The problem appears when things don’t work well.

Good design can go unnoticed, but will surely not

5. 32% of people would stop interacting with the brand after one bad experience, as stated in a 2018 research by PWC. This can refer to other things apart from design, such as bad customer support or offensive advertisement. Yet, the design carries a great chunk of responsibility for customer experience, especially in digital products.

Remember that design means not only first impression from an aesthetic image. There are many other design-related factors that have a strong impact on business, like, for example, website loading speed. Here, each second matters.

6. During the first seconds of page load (0-5), each additional second of waiting causes a 4,42% loss in conversion rates (load time calculated with 3G connection). 
7. A 2019 research by Unbounce found that 45% of people would be less likely to make a purchase and 36% would be less likely to return to the website if they had to wait longer than expected.

The same research found that most people prioritize load speed to visual effects, such as animations, videos, and even photos, in some cases.

The importance of page speed load is not a surprise for most product owners. But why are websites still too slow, then? The answer might be, because of the internet speed. People working in tech are likely to have faster than average internet speed that is different from what an average user has.

That is why product owners are likely to be biased unless they conduct proper user research. And here comes the next argument.

User testing is essential because users interact with products differently than you and your team members

8. People working in tech can assume that young people are tech-savvy almost from birth. However, it’s not completely true. Research states that only 68% of internet users aged 18-29 are very confident using digital devices to do the things they need to do online.

This means that about 32% of users don’t feel very confident. What does it mean for product owners and designers? It means that using digital devices is not that easy for many people, even if they do it every day. While many of us believe that generations Z or Alpha are fully digital-native, the truth is that the majority of the population is far from that.

There is no research that would show that simple and intuitive UX design could make these 32% feel more confident using digital devices, but we can assume that it can benefit them a lot (and everybody else as well). How do we know that users with different skills and confidence levels find your product easy to use? You guessed it, test.

User research has a positive impact on business performance

9. Companies, where user research is well integrated across the product development process, are more likely to notice a positive impact on business metrics (30%-70% difference compared to the companies where user research is only the designer's job).

Adaptation for mobile is a must

10. In 2021, 54,5% of global website traffic was generated by mobile devices (excluding tablets). 

When your product is not mobile-friendly, it would miss many users. Many people don’t even own a laptop or PC, as they can do most of the things on mobile or tablet. Statistics show that there are even more people who use only mobile phones than those who use only desktop.

11. In 2021, there were 4,66 billion active internet users in the world (59,5% of humans). 92,6% (4,32 billion) of them use their mobile devices to access the internet.
12. At the same time, conversion rates are slightly higher for desktop than mobile. Global Monetate Q1 report 2020 showed that mobile conversion rates were at 1.81% with desktop at 1.98% and tablets at 2.92%. Mobile is important for discovery and browsing, but some things people still prefer to buy on desktop.

When you know your customers well and have evidence that they would only use the desktop version, you can save resources on having a mobile app. However, for any website design being responsive is an absolute must, also for the following reason.

13. By 2022, 70% of all websites are on mobile-indexing, and all the new websites will belong to this group. This means that Google ranking is calculated based on the mobile version instead of the desktop one. So, a website that is not optimized for mobile would appear lower in search — on desktop, as well.

Everybody in the team should take care of user experience

The answer “Who owns user experience?” doesn’t necessarily mean “UX professional”. 

14. 16% of respondents of a survey by UserZoom said that everybody on the team owns user experience. What is more, 14% claim that at C-level each business unit is responsible for UX.

These numbers are close for both small and big (over 5,000 employees) companies. That is why we collaborate closely with our clients throughout the whole work process.

What about real examples?

Statistics often tend to be outdated, blurry, and easily manipulated. Not all the data that we refer to would be approved by a professional statistician. Yet, it gives us hints and outlines the trends. Some people who may find the abovementioned arguments not convincing may be more impressed by numbers from real-life cases.

Most of the articles claiming that design can increase conversions by 2,5%, 35%, or 591% refer to specific case studies. Nothing promises you the same result as in a case study, but people like to follow successful companies like Intuit, Airbnb, or Uber — and we know they did a good job with design.

A carefully chosen case study or a piece of statistics can prove almost any point. To prove the importance of user testing, there is an old story from 2010 on how Microsoft chose this particular shade of blue for the links: the color that performed best during user testing, is claimed to have added $80 million to annual revenue.

And here is a recent story to support our arguments that design has an impact: in 2021, Citibank lost $500 million because an employee didn’t check the right checkbox. If you see the UX design of the bank software, you would totally understand him. (Talking about banks, we have an article on Fintech UX design hurdles).

The most secure way of dealing with statistics? Make your own

This doesn’t mean you should go and run a research with 5 000 participants to ensure an unbiased report. When we focus on a single product, small things like Google Analytics or detailed email surveys would do a lot.

If you want to track the impact of UX design on your business, start with regular tracking of key SaaS metrics, usability metrics, and UX design KPIs. Seeing the change in your personal data is more important than all the statistics from the reports out there.