What are the costs of a poor design?

There are so many articles about good design and its exciting outcomes. Well, people like reading about good things. But what’s there on the dark side of the moon? It is time to dive a bit deeper into the consequences of not having those good things.

by Alec Vishmidt Business

As a note, there is a significant difference between B2B and B2C markets and the impact of a poor design, so I would focus more on B2C in this article, outlining those differences in the upcoming article.

Judging a book by its cover

We heard the idiom don’t judge a book by its cover, which is a metaphorical phrase meaning one should not judge the worth or value of something by its outward appearance alone. But we do that constantly. People consume nearly 90% of the information visually. It is ten times harder to convince people to buy a product or subscribe to a service without a good visual appearance.

And what happens when you don’t have a convincing design?

Your marketing efforts are sub-optimal. You can get as many views, but you get lower rates of real customer engagement. You just get fewer leads per $1 of a marketing budget.
You get your top level of a conversion funnel narrow. All efforts to make a technically perfect, logically outstanding product lay bones because people just miss it. Nobody would get the marvelous technology and would not see an enormous effort invested if potential customers would not pass those poorly looking marketing gates.

Missing the power of a first impression

You have only one chance to make a first impression. Or people do get the value, or they don’t. Or they convert into your customers, or they find ways to solve their needs in another way. And you have only 7 seconds on of an attention span on average to make an impact.

So, what happens when the design and visual appearance is just average or even poor?

You don’t build trustworthy relations from the start. You know that feeling when words on a website do make sense, but you are somehow opposed to a product or business. You can’t tell exactly why — is it because of weird illustrations, a glitchy header, or a dirty shadow in one of the sections? Those details create this feeling — you are uncomfortable, and you close the browser tab.
You lose the belief in a bright future. People like investing in something that would not vanish in the next year or so. And even your business is stable and you heavily invest in its development, this means nothing if your dashboard looks abandoned or outdated.

Running too slow to stay in the same place

Businesses don’t work in a vacuum; they are constantly surrounded by competitors, rivals, and even not-yet-existing entrepreneurs ready to take risks and get their chunk of a market.

So, what happens if you stop investing in design and customer experience enhancements?

Your rivals put this opportunity to outperform you into their business plans and pitch decks. Stakeholders and investors are human beings, and they unconsciously like visually attractive things. They are biased to the idea that visually attractive means better sales, thus leaning towards making investments into your competitors.
Your customers observe that rival platforms look nicer, perform better each day. Other customers are happy with other platforms. At some point in time, they would decide to switch the business they pay.

Having no face to lose

The relations between a service and a user rely on generated trust versus lost trust in the long run. Why do we google anything? Because we have a strong trust in finding the best result, and we trust that Google search works 24/7/365. Why not binging or yahooing it? Because we are not sure we have the same best result as a minimum, plus, we don’t want to break a habit. But if a company would “betray” the user, for instance, by re-selling user data to third parties or providing low-quality results, this would make a severe reputation loss.

So, what happens when you have some issues but leave them as-is for a while?

With each unsuccessful interaction, glitch, or bug, a product loses a bit of trust instead of generating it. People don’t care about technology limitations or unreliable third parties — the trust degrades no matter the cause.
Even if the mistake is the user's fault, trust still degrades if the system doesn’t prevent it or help fix it. It sounds weird, but this is how it works.
As a result, people abandon the system and stop paying or using it, finding alternate, more reliable, and trustworthy ways of achieving goals.
Moreover, users with low trust would not recommend your product to others, decreasing the virality to zero or even to negative values.

Conclusion

The consequences of a poor design are not that visible in the short term, but they could lead to significant adverse outcomes at the end of the day.

It is a no-brainer that design and user experience are among the dozens of factors of success and failure. But for customer-centered businesses, customer experience should be one of the top priorities to invest in.

A slow sort of country! said the Queen. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!