Small Business: UX Design on a Budget

You may occasionally be asked to create excellent UX design on a tight budget, especially if you work for a smaller company. Although it may seem as though you are being asked to do the impossible, there are a few guidelines that can help you avoid a glaring dead end and guarantee you get the best possible UX design.

There is no getting around the fact that a great product requires great UX design. However, small businesses frequently lack the resources to provide a great experience. Small businesses typically have simpler navigation, content, and audience segments, as well as easier-to-reduce objectives because brand recognition and traffic volume are lower.

In many instances, the difference between the cost of UX and the return on investment as a percentage increase in sales is negligible. UX incrementally improves performance. When traffic is high, this generates a lot of revenue with small percentage increases, but when traffic drops to less than 5,000 visits per month, the numbers for small businesses simply don’t add up.

What can UX designers do as a result? The solution, to use a cliched but apt business phrase, is to grab the low-hanging fruit. Here are strategies to help you succeed with UX design on a tight budget. The best web design tools or the best UI prototyping tools might be what you’re looking for.

Learn from Your Big Competitors

Do some research on competitors and major corporations in your client’s industry to see how they operate because big businesses frequently invest a lot of money in user experience. Choose five and compare them to the competition to get a good idea of the dos and don’ts. Online reviews for these well-known brands frequently contain gold.

You can compare competitors’ websites over time using comparison tools offered by some of the best SEO tools. You could even do the research and check out past versions of their websites on the Internet Archive to see how they have changed.

Improve UX Design Knowledge and Experience

There is no quick fix, but if you don’t already have a solid understanding of UX design theory, it’s time to start learning. This is especially true if you want to design UX for your own product but lack the funds to hire a qualified UX designer.

This is a great way to start out crushing UX design on a budget. Once you have the foundation, you should try to gain experience wherever you can, like by working as a UX professional’s shadow.

Create Mockups

Mockups can be used for a variety of UX tasks and are a crucial step in determining how users will interact with a website or app. With a pencil and paper, you can brainstorm and sketch out various elements to produce a very functional site map, page map, actions, content structure, and user flow, such as which pages are required, what your client’s goals are, and what customers are looking for. There are also a wide variety of tools available that you can use to make mockups.

Use Google Analytics

We can use Google Analytics to collect data about their behavior, whereabouts, devices, user flow, and actions without having to speak to our customers. There are many ways you can use this to enhance your user experience. You can identify the point at which users are abandoning an action or purchase, for instance. If this occurs midway through, what is deterring them?

The content strategy for your client can be shaped even by knowing which blog posts receive the most traffic. You can get site analytics from many of the top web hosting companies.

Use Heatmaps

It would be nice if UX designers could watch people using their app or website that they are designing. Ideally, this would be in a situation where they actually use it on a normal setting in order to get objective and realistic results. Alternatively, roping in your friend would be doing it on a budget.

Heatmaps are a great alternative, though, if you can’t watch someone use your site. You can add a tracking code for free on websites like Smartlook to collect crucial data on user behavior. Just be sure to include them in the cookie policy for the website.

Ask Existing Customers

Why not ask these contacts for feedback if most businesses, even if their numbers are relatively small, you will have a mailing list or database of customers or leads? Instead of just giving yes/no answers, formulate five straightforward questions that will spark conversation. Consider carefully what will help you gain the most understanding of the issues you are attempting to solve.

Offering a reward is one way to get more responses; for instance, those who respond could be entered into a drawing for prizes. In the process, you build goodwill and get insightful feedback from actual users. You can make use of a tool like Survey Monkey to analyze the results of your respondents’ answers.

Learn How to Boost Conversions

The ultimate objective for the business will almost certainly be some sort of conversion if you’re designing UX for a website. It’s important to learn some specific techniques, but good UX can also increase conversion chances.

A UX designer should have powerful tools like multivariate tests (MVT), conversion rate optimization (CRO), and A/B testing in their toolbox. The results won’t be conclusive if you don’t have the traffic, but there are still benefits to be had by taking note of the aforementioned strategies and making small adjustments.

Check First Impressions

Even if you’re still in the design stage, you can still conduct tests. UseabilityHub’s Five Second Tests are a great little tool to get a snapshot of what people think upon their first glance at the site.

As we mentioned, if your website doesn’t have a lot of traffic, the results of such conversion testing won’t be conclusive. You can elicit users’ first impressions by asking a few quick questions. Self-recruited tests up to two minutes in length are offered without charge.

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