Business: Case Studies

Today’s world of mobile app and Web-site development is seeing high adoption of UX design and research, from planning to product launch. UX design is a human-first approach to product design and sets the tone for app development, keeping the focus on satisfying your users. Whether you’re designing physical or digital products, your goal is to create useful, easy-to-use products that provide a great experience to the users who interact with them. Those everyday interactions should be enjoyable and accessible to all users. Throughout your design process, it’s important to closely integrate your UX and UI design efforts. UI design focuses on the look and feel, the aesthetic experience of a product, including its fonts, colors, visual affordances for interaction such as buttons, and page layouts.

In this article, we’ll focus on our UX design journey, creating a motion-design app for smartphones and tablets. A unique feature of this app is its platform: The use of smartphones and tablets for professional motion design is not common. Designers typically create motion designs using applications on desktop computers. Read More

To stay relevant and avoid disruption through advances in technology or globalization, more and more organizations have embraced user-centered design and UX research methods. Thus, after years of fighting for a seat at the decision-making table, it is becoming more common for UX professionals to find one there. Still, executives often ask UX teams to quantify the value and return on investment (ROI) of their UX efforts. While calculating the ROI of User Experience can be challenging for consumer products and services, it can be truly daunting in enterprise organizations.

This series of articles will describe our journey of discovery in learning how to measure the ROI of User Experience at a large, Fortune-500 company that develops human capital management software and services.

The company had made the decision to invest in several innovation centers throughout the US. Observing the adoption of User Experience in other large enterprises such as IBM, General Electric, Capital One, Honeywell, Philips, and JPL, they came to believe that user-centered design was an essential component of the innovation equation. Therefore, they established our UX team just over three years ago. Read More

In Part 1 of this series, “Measuring the ROI for UX in an Enterprise Organization,” JD and her colleagues discussed their enterprise UX team’s journey in developing a UX-measurement plan. Their objective for this plan was to identify a measurable connection between user-centered design (UCD) efforts and company performance metrics.

Now, in Part 2 of this story, we’ll discuss how two enterprises in vastly different industries—a Fortune-500 human capital–management (HCM) company and a healthcare-technology company—have modeled the impact of employing a user-centered design process on financial metrics. We’ll also suggest some key questions to consider as you embark upon your own UX-measurement initiative at your organization. Read More