How bad UX/UI design affects your startup

How important is UI/UX design for your startup? Often, entrepreneurs decide to sacrifice design for the sake of faster and cheaper development. It makes some sense since the design itself is not a product and it doesn't have much functionality (with rare exceptions).

Yet, the question of whether to add design to the product causes controversy. Let's try to figure out whether UI & UX design is a necessary option for startups and how exactly a bad design can affect your business.

Do startups need designers?

As you know, UI/UX Design by Uitop are like the skin and the skeleton of a future product, while software represents organs that make this mechanism work. A user-friendly interface and a pleasant design are key components of a successful product. However, let's not forget that we are talking about startups. It means that they have limited resources.

There is a situation when you can sacrifice your product’s design. You can do so if your product carries great value and has truly unique functionality. In this case, users will be ready to turn a blind eye to the poor design of your product. They are mainly interested in the useful features of the product.

In any other case, you cannot sacrifice design. If you aim to create a workable and needed product, poor design will harm your brand and communicate the wrong message to users. Poor navigation, incomprehensible interface, and numerous buttons — all this will lead to your product's failure.

What is also worth mentioning is the popular and widely-used Lean Startup method, with the MVP development at its core. Yes, there is an opinion that UI/UX design is one of those things that you should definitely get rid of when creating an MVP. However, this isn't true. As elsewhere, there are some nuances here, but remember one thing - the product should be visually appealing and easy-to-get even at the MVP stage. Otherwise, no one will pay attention to it and you fail your MVP launch.

So, does your startup need a UI/UX designer? Definitely.

How bad design affects your startup

Obviously, poor design results in a bad impression of your product. This can include anything: an unattractive logo, poor color choice, awkward usability, etc.

However, poor design is not only about impression. Bad design is expensive. Of course, this is due to the fact that UI and UX affect every aspect of your product and literally all the indicators of your business performance. However, we’ll focus on two main aspects today — brand and customer experience.

Brand

Your brand is everything: your value, your strategy, and your market position. This is what distinguishes you from your competitors and what allows you to occupy a niche. This is what instills immediate associations with your company.

The most successful companies strive to reflect their unique mixture of colors and shapes wherever possible — the official website, mobile application, items & products, and so on. Take a look at Netflix. I’m sure, having just read the name of the company, their red logo and red-white-gray palette of colors immediately pops up in your head, right? This is what we are talking about.

This is a unique function of the human brain. It helps us recognize the outside world and draw conclusions. People subconsciously associate specific images and colors with something that they like and vice versa. So, branding works in such a way that people like the new iPhone's look, even before they see it.

Poor design, in any form (inconvenient, ugly, etc.), directly harms your brand. A bad logo, which is the key element that defines your brand, will cause bad associations. So, what would you do if the design of your product fails? Most likely, you will decide to start re-branding and face greater costs.

Customer experience

In today's business world, with a huge number of different products and companies, user feedback matters a lot. Everyone, from small entrepreneurs to large corporations, is trying to attract and keep the users whose average attention span is 8 seconds.

Perhaps, it’s hard to describe the perfect UI and UX design. However, we all can easily imagine bad design — for example, sites that are filled with bugs, lag, and generally have unresponsive navigation.

In the era of social networks, Yelp and Trustpilot, user reviews can ruin companies and, conversely, bring millions. Therefore, there is a war for every positive review. With the wide choice that users have today, you will never be able to retain the user who is already disappointed with your product. Remember that.

Summing Up

Even big companies strive to regularly optimize and upgrade their products to keep their users satisfied. So, the user-friendliness of a product should also be your priority. Customers can tolerate minor flaws of the product at the early stages of a startup’s life, but they still expect improvements in the future. Even MVPs, which often don't need design at all, are perceived as a canvas of the future product that will have a better look.

So, if you once thought that design was useless to your startup, think again. Perhaps, at the moment, you are ready to sacrifice it, but in no case, you should ignore it. Because you need to work on your company's branding and positioning from the very first days.