The Often-Ignored 3rd Pillar of Exceptional UX
Is user experience (UX) a pivotal factor for any brand’s reputation? A big “yes” in the digital age. A positive UX keeps users loyal to a product or brand. For instance, 88% of online shoppers are unlikely to return to a site after one “bad” experience.
Slow-loading web pages and poor-performing applications can frustrate most users, thus leading to poor UX. Hence, it’s hardly surprising that most customer-centric companies are investing more money in improving their UX or customer experience (CX).
To deliver an exceptional UX, most companies focus on two major pillars – namely, product and interface design and ease of navigation. However, a third pillar, namely performance & reliability, is equally important. Unfortunately, this pillar doesn’t get quite the attention it deserves and that brings down the most carefully crafted UX strategies.
This is where performance engineering becomes central to UX.
Why Is Performance Engineering Critical for Delivering an Exceptional UX?
For product companies, application performance and reliability are critical for delivering an exceptional UX. Application performance has a direct impact on the:
- User’s expectations
- Brand loyalty and reputation
- Customer acquisition and retention
- Overall efficiency and productivity
Performance engineering aims towards building performance and reliability right from the application development stage. By focusing on the application design, it can identify performance-related issues in the initial phase of development. This makes it easier for application developers to deliver a positive UX and meet customer expectations through their products.
Effectively, performance engineering is much more than delivering a bug-free product. Performance engineering is, in fact, necessary to avoid application failures, improve application performance, and ensure application scalability – and address them before they escalate into major problems.
Next, let’s discuss five reasons why product development companies must adopt performance engineering in their UX strategy.
5 Reasons Why Product Companies Must Adopt Performance Engineering for UX
Without optimum performance and reliability, companies can no longer hope to deliver applications with an exceptional UX. Favorably, with the “Shift Left” approach, they can leverage performance engineering to resolve performance-related issues earlier in the development phase.
Here are 5 reasons why product companies must adopt performance engineering as part of their UX strategy:
1. To Meet User Expectations
Courtesy: WebsiteBuilderExpert
An online shopping survey found that at peak times, 75% of shoppers are likely to leave a slow-loading website for a competitor’s website. Similarly, Google research shows that bounce rate increases by 32% whenever the page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds.
Modern users have a plethora of applications to choose from. They expect every application to perform optimally and reliably. Most users have lower patience for slow-loading applications or those that crash frequently. They are likely to get frustrated with poor-performing applications (including those with a great UI).
2. For Efficient and Productive Applications
Business users need an efficient and productive application to complete their work on time and achieve their organizational goals. Without performance engineering, inefficient or unproductive applications can frustrate most users and disrupt their workflow.
Besides affecting productive work, inefficient applications can also impact the quality of generated business data and data-driven insights. This can lead to poor decision-making processes, which can ultimately impact the company’s bottom line profits and revenue.
3. To Improve Brand Reputation
According to YouGov, 31% of American consumers will switch brands if the company lies about their product’s performance & efficiency.
A poor customer experience (CX) has a direct impact on the brand’s credibility and reputation. Application users associate poor performance & reliability with a lack of brand professionalism and technical expertise. Alternatively, users associate a fast and reliable application with a positive brand image and the best quality.
Performance engineering addresses business concerns and questions such as:
- Is my application’s current response time acceptable to my users?
- What performance bottlenecks are my end-users currently facing?
- How can we improve the loading time and speed of the mobile app?
4. To Attract and Retain Customers
In a competitive world, product companies lose 77% of their application users in the first 3 days post-installation. This percentage increases to 90% after 30 days. Hence, companies need to constantly replace their lost customers with new users.
To acquire and retain users, companies must deploy key strategies aimed at improving their user experience. Slow or unproductive applications lead to “bad” word-of-mouth, thus impacting the customer acquisition rate.
With performance engineering, companies can automate their customer journey by:
- Identifying their user’s churn points
- Segmenting users based on their behavior and buying profile
5. To Meet Technical Expectations
Thanks to constant innovations and technologies, most users expect optimum performance, scalability, and reliability from their applications. For instance, they want their mobile apps to:
- Utilize their underlying device capabilities fully
- Perform in a highly responsive mode
- Provide a consistent experience across multiple devices and platforms
Additionally, with new technologies, customer expectations about their application performance keep changing over time. Effectively, companies must meet these technical requirements to deliver a positive UX. Performance engineering enables applications to meet the technical expectations of their users.
Conclusion
Besides a user-centric product design and ease of navigation, application performance & reliability is the 3rd pillar of facilitating an exceptional user experience. Innovations like product engineering and digital experience monitoring can address this often-ignored pillar of UX.
With its focus on application performance, appNeura has enabled product development companies to address various issues in application performance and reliability. With its pioneering Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) product, appNeura has helped these organisations proactively take corrective steps to address the poor performance of applications – thus facilitating an exceptional UX.
Looking to build a fast and reliable application then don’t ignore the critical third pillar of UX. Let us help you deliver the awesome UX your customers deserve. Contact us today.