Judging a book by its cover
People consume nearly 90% of information visually. It is ten times harder to convince people to buy a product or subscribe to a service without a good visual appearance.
- Marketing efforts become sub-optimal. You get lower rates of real customer engagement and fewer leads per dollar of marketing budget.
- The top of the conversion funnel narrows. All efforts on a technically perfect product are wasted because people miss it at the poorly designed marketing gates.
Missing the power of a first impression
You have only one chance to make a first impression. You have only 7 seconds of an attention span on average to make an impact.
- You don't build trustworthy relations from the start. Weird illustrations, glitchy headers, or dirty shadows create discomfort that drives users away.
- You lose the belief in a bright future. Even a stable business means nothing if its dashboard looks abandoned or outdated.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 ready to take risks and get their chunk of a market.
- Rivals put the opportunity to outperform you into their business plans. Stakeholders unconsciously lean towards visually attractive products when making investments.
- Customers observe that rival platforms look nicer and perform better each day. At some point, they decide to switch.
Having no face to lose
The relations between a service and a user rely on generated trust versus lost trust in the long run.
- 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—trust degrades regardless of the cause.
- Even if a mistake is the user's fault, trust still degrades if the system doesn't prevent it or help fix it.
- People abandon the system and stop paying, finding alternate, more reliable ways of achieving goals.
- Users with low trust will not recommend the product to others, decreasing virality to zero or negative values.
Conclusion
The consequences of poor design are not visible in the short term, but lead to significant adverse outcomes. Design and user experience are among the key factors of success and failure. For customer-centred businesses, customer experience should be one of the top priorities to invest in.
