Entrepreneurship
Every Entrepreneur Should Understand Basic Design Psychology
You won’t be able to build a billion-dollar startup without it.
Design is something that many people underestimate in their products and businesses.
Many people still believe that design, or specifically web design, was invented just for aesthetics or for fun.
However, it might be one of the most crucial parts of creating the product that would truly impact the world and help you get much higher results after all.
How do the users think? How to build the right roadmap? How to make an app more efficient?
These are the questions that every right designer asks himself while doing anything. And we’re gonna dive deeper into why YOU exactly need to understand the design sphere better.
Conversions, Conversions, and Conversions
So, design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works.
At some point, design might be even harder than software engineering. Yeah, I’m not kidding.
The amount of time spent sitting in front of the screen just to build the right customer journey map or to make an interface 1% more efficient is just ridiculous.
You have to understand that just drawing rectangles isn’t the design sphere. The design sphere is when the whole team tries to understand how to make the current design more profitable for business.
I can confidently say that design and business logic are basically the same spheres.
One can’t exist without another. To make the interface more efficient and the conversion better, you gotta understand the client’s needs and the needs of the business.
I worked with many clients, starting with small indie projects and ending up with large SaaS companies with $2 million YRR and beyond. Of course, the workflow is completely different for each size, but the end goal is the same — get higher conversions.
When you can update the design and increase conversions by just 5%, it’ll add $100k to the revenue. Now it sounds reasonable to hire a senior UI/UX designer, doesn’t it? And it also explains why some of them might get hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries at FAANG companies.
So yeah, if you have a shitty website, people just won’t be interested enough to click anywhere and spend their time on it. By having bad packaging, you won’t catch the eye of the potential customer, and so on.
If you already have a business, then it’s ten times easier for you to get into the design sphere. Include the fact that you don’t have to be a professional.
You’ll be halfway through just understanding how to use the data you can gather by A/B tests and some cool UX tricks (which I regularly talk about).
Customer Loyalty
Now, that we understand that design is necessary for improving conversions, it’s time to look at the second part — customer loyalty.
It’s something that tells you how many times customers return to you and how much you earn from a single client over a long period of time.
The best example here is probably Starbucks.
They have a huge and literally perfect brand that people love all over the world. It has a great logo, branding, atmosphere, and so on.
To understand customer loyalty, we can take a look at the lifetime value (LTV) of an average customer.
Right now, it’s around $14,099. It means that, on average, the customer would spend this sum throughout his life. That’s insane.
Let’s say that the average price of a cup of coffee is $4. So it would equal 3,500 cups of coffee. 3,500 returns to the store. 3,500 conversions with Barista.
While designing your brand, you need to make sure that you’ll create an atmosphere for people to come back.
If your website isn’t easy to navigate and doesn’t give any cool first impressions, then why would I come back?
Make sure that you’re building an environment for users/clients/customers to spend more time with you and your brand, which will increase the LTV.
Brand Differentiation
Brand differentiation is something that can’t be measured with numbers or metrics. But we, as designers, need to make sure that we position the business right on the market
In a few words, it’s something that helps you to show how you’re not like “everyone else”.
If you’re building a SaaS company, it’s worth copying some things that worked for others, but you still need to make sure that you differentiate yourself greatly.
Just ask yourself — Does my product look similar to someone else’s? Does it give the impression of something new to the user?
Again, you basically can’t measure brand differentiation, but it might be the reason why your website has low conversions. Even if you’ve done everything correctly, there’s still a need to be unique on the market.
Conclusion
Design isn’t the easiest sphere to learn, but it’s essential and crucial to implement in YOUR business.
I accidentally became a UI/UX designer, and it has helped me a lot throughout my business career.
I understand how to build a website for my agency to bring me more clients, and I understand how to create a truly revolutionary product that will only progress over time.
I genuinely advise you to spend at least a few days diving into this super interesting and helpful sphere, so you’ll just progress to other spheres much faster!
After all, opportunities await, and it’s time to act!