Brand trust ensures that more people will be willing to buy from you – or use your services – and, thus, share their payment details on your website or app. Loyal customers are those that don’t question your products’ quality and know that they can rely on you if something goes wrong. Loyal customers are the ones who not just buy and use your products or services, but also those who share the good news with their friends, family, co-workers, and even strangers. Loyal customers are one of your most powerful promotion tools.

If you have a substantial online presence, your app or website is one of your principal points of contact with the audience. Using either of them, your clients can interact with your brand and form their judgment about it. There are also social media that you can use along with online advertising and a few other means, but your particular site and app are the best way to connect with your current and potential customers.

It brings us to a crucial part of any digital product or service, which is user experience (UX) design.

UX design is about providing your audience with the best experience (who would’ve thought) possible throughout their journey on your site, app, or what-not. Of course, if your company doesn’t deal with user experience design regularly or you don’t have a separate design team for that, you won’t succeed in creating a great UX design.

You might consider building a UX design team, but this will require a lot of time and money, and then some before they all get used to each other, your brand, and its vision and goals. For such cases, the best way around would be hiring a UI/UX design agency that would provide you with access to a vast talent pool – specialists, who develop great designs for multiple clients from different niches regularly. Connecting your development and marketing teams with that of the UX agency, you will be able to build an incredibly useful product or service that will promote customer loyalty better than any marketing campaign. Below are a few ways UX design can help build customer loyalty.

Appearance and Usability Matter

No matter what one may think about it, looks are everything. In other words, if you pass a store on the street and it has a dirty window with cobweb at its corners, a rusty old door and turned over trash can, coming inside will be the last thing on your mind, even if real treasures are waiting for you behind the door.

Your website or app’s appearance has a quite similar effect on your audience. While your digital product has to be usable and provide specific functions to users, its appearance will have a significant impact on them, especially if it doesn’t look right. In other words, your digital product’s appearance issues will be considered as usability problems, thus affecting user experience. It is one of the many difficult tasks a UX design team has to deal with when developing UX designs.

This phenomenon is known as the aesthetic usability effect. It means that people believe that digital products that look better, work better and are generally more usable. It happens all the time, even if these products don’t work as well as they should.

Good design should capture the attention of your app’s or website’s users in the first moments, even before they perform their first actions in it. In other words, design matters, and when you blend it with usability, it creates a great user experience. At the same time, great UX design is a guarantee of consumer trust.

Transparency and Communication Matter

People love transparency. The more transparent your product or service is, the more loyal your customers are. How can you improve openness, and what does UX design have to do with it?

First of all, you should share information on your services, products, offers, etc. It may include a team description, detailed description of provided services, offers, and so on. The more info you provide to your audience, the more trust you are to gain. It is directly related to UX design – where should this be placed, how it should show, how can the user use it, etc.

Even such a small thing like a branded link can improve the user experience along with transparency. Since branded links let you customize whatever comes after the slash, it’s a great way of letting users know where you lead them to. Another advantage of branded links is that they help your audience know that you’re not scamming them. As a result, you get higher CTR, gain trust, and improve customer loyalty.

Don’t forget to let users know what’s going to happen to their data, when – and if – they share it with you. That is, in case your website uses cookies, you should inform its visitors about this. There are several ways you can do it, including headers, footers, and pop-ups. Depending on your site’s design and overall concept, you should discuss it with the UX design team to figure out which one will work best for you. Because cookies should improve user experience, you should design the notice correctly.

At the same time, don’t forget to share your data, too. It includes some contact data, contact forms, social media pages. Make sure your audience can leave their feedback regarding your product or service. Companies often forget about this, and people get frustrated. And frustration isn’t helpful when you try to improve customer loyalty.

Security Matters

If you want to drive conversions and build customer loyalty at the same time, you should understand that security is a vital UX design aspect. For example, SSL certificate installation on your website will let its visitors know they can trust your brand, which promotes smoother interactions with users. This particular type of security is about the provision of safe, encrypted communications between a site and a browser, which helps to keep user data private throughout its way on the web. So, talk to the UX design agency about how you can let your users know that they are using a secure website and that their data is at no risk of being exposed and exploited.

The same goes for applications and other digital products. While it’s initially a matter of your development team – choosing a security system and making sure it works properly – letting your audience know that they are safe is a matter of design. You want it to be prominent and clear, but you don’t want it to look silly or intrusive.

Conclusion

Trust and excellent user experience go hand in hand. A coherent, efficient user experience design will help your brand build trust and promote positive associations with it. Providing your audience with smooth navigation and apparent features is merely telling them that you care about their time and experience. If you want your customers to appreciate and enjoy your digital product, you must find a reputable UX design agency and work together towards a spectacular result that will embed your brand into the hearts of your audience.