How accessible UX design benefits business

Used correctly, accessible user experience (UX) design helps further improve a company’s long-term revenue potential. These same design elements can also help protect your company’s reputation over time, even as new competitors enter your market.

1. Protection from legal liability

In certain cases, your company might be legally required to install accessible features. To fully comply with local, state, or federal guidelines, you may need to implement them across your product or service portfolio.

Your company might face a variety of legal issues if you decide against implementing accessible UX features. One commonplace feature — the seatbelt — helps improve a consumer’s travel experience by improving safety on the road. Legally, car manufacturers must comply with federal and state-issued seat belt mandates or face fines, sanctions, and other disciplinary measures.

Eventually, failure to comply with a mandated accessibility feature could yield serious consequences. Your company might lose contracts with clients, and your reputation will likely plummet. You’re also likely to lose customers if you neglect legal accessibility requirements: Many customers are hesitant to partner with non-compliant brands, for fear of personal legal action.

2. A leg-up for branding efforts

No matter your market, your company’s goal is to provide as many customers as possible with a high-quality experience. If customers want to return to your brand after a positive interaction, it should be easy for them to do so.

Conveniently, accessible UX design yields a similar result: It helps all of your customers comfortably navigate your products or services without any difficulties.

When you marry your company’s goals with the power of accessible design, you can leverage effective branding to find potential customers, help convert them into consumers, and deliver results.

Your company can upgrade its branding in ways that promote accessibility without compromising your current brand package. Consider enhancing font sizes in your logo, or revising website coloration to better contrast words and images. These changes and others, though simple, can help your branding naturally evolve alongside consumers.

3. Customer acquisition

With poor UX, you run the risk of turning customers away from your brand — even when you provide the best products or services in your market. Fortunately, the reverse is also true: When you prioritize accessible UX design, you can help your business gain additional customers.

For many customers, it is a contributing factor when choosing a company. Whether that customer is searching for a new dentist or considering several restaurant options, accessibility — particularly online accessibility — is key.

If you depend on accessibility to help you win new customers, understand that UX design is only half the battle. You’ll also need a way to track and decipher the customer data you receive. Through thorough data analysis, you can defend any customer-related decisions you make with direct insight into your consumers’ preferences, buying habits, and potential customer value.

4. Customer retention

Frustration is one of the reasons why customers might leave one company for another. Even if a customer is initially satisfied with your products or services, a design flaw or customer experience shortcoming might be enough to drive them toward new options.

Accessible UX design can sometimes help you prevent customer loss and improve consumer retention rates. Often, a customer’s issues with your company can be solved through accessible design.

Develop a list of the largest pain points your customers experience with your brand. Whether it’s ineffective customer service or insufficient product lives, be honest with yourself and your employees about where UX might be failing your customer base. Consider asking loyal customers for their input as well.

Once you’ve arrived at a list of UX issues worth fixing, take the highest-priority items to your development team with specific instructions. Make sure the original design issues have been resolved before returning your product to market.

This strategy routinely yields positive dividends in the hospitality industry. Whether the hotel room is too small or the air conditioning unit doesn’t work, hotel guests often take design-related issues to the front desk. The best hotels respond by overcompensating for the issue, leaving guests with a more satisfactory customer experience than they otherwise would’ve received.

5. Strides in innovation

When you implement accessible UX design elements, you’re innovating. You’re creating a new solution to an old problem, one that helps your customers use your products or services in more efficient ways. Sometimes, market innovation is simply the result of one company improving product design.

Accessible UX design sometimes leads to the creation of an entirely new product. Tired of cold coffee, one company — Ember — vastly improved the design of the traditional coffee mug. Their self-heating mugs keep your beverages warm, at a temperature you specify.

If you find yourself struggling to solve an issue your customers’ pain points experience, a similar redesign might be in the works. Paired with the right approach, accessible UX design can lead straight to market innovation.

6. Industry leadership opportunities

Innovation can quickly help to separate your business from the rest, in ways that customers will notice. Once you fully implement accessible UX design strategies, you could find yourself or your company leading your market.

Consider the effect that new accessibility standards could have, both for your business and your market. After pioneering new accessible UX design features on your website, across your products, or throughout your marketing, you might quickly assume a leadership role within your industry.

Accessibility can quickly catapult your business into a leadership position. In 2008, Marcus Sheridan — CEO of River Pools — realized the value of answering customer questions online. He implemented new accessible UX design features on his website that enabled him to address unsure customers, and the results saved his business.

Today, his website is the most visited pool authority site in the world. He catapulted from near-bankruptcy to the top of his industry, simply because he implemented the right accessibility features at the right time.

7. More valuable products

In some markets, accessible UX design can further improve the value of your products and services. Particularly in government-run organizations, or in industries that thrive on government contracts, accessibility and product value have a parallel relationship.

Some customers seeking contracts might require that providers use accessible third-party products. When this is the case, take time to implement accessible design features that will make your product portfolio more appealing.

Before you can apply accessible UX design solutions, you’ll need to better understand the issues your customers face. To gain a better understanding of your customers’ needs, consult ADA guidelines. These terms can inform your business’s operations, as you continually strive to make your products and services more accessible to as many customers as possible.

Effective accessibility strategies are often useless without a way to track their results. Find a Customer Data Platform that can help you analyze and draw conclusions from the information left behind by customers.