Linked - User experience vs. business goals: finding the balance

Link - User experience vs. business goals: finding the balance (Ariel Verber on Medium)

“Often, user experience and business goals go hand in hand. A simple & clear pricing page would most likely save time and unnecessary headaches to the user, and also increase the conversion rate. Everybody wins. Sometimes, they don’t — making it too easy to cancel a subscription might make some unsatisfied users feel a positive relief, but also increase cancellation rate and the company would lose a significant amount of money.”

I completely agree with the premise of this article: a good designer needs to fully understand business goals. However for me it’s not about finding a balance between business goals and user experience. I just don’t see it as a zero-sum game.

I try to work with the assumption that user experience and business goals are almost always aligned in the long-run.

If you want to grow sustainably, doing the right thing for your customers is pretty much always aligned with doing the right thing for the business. For example making it difficult to unsubscribe, or downgrade will mean that a customer’s last experience with your product is a negative one. This makes it less likely that the customer will return to your product when their needs, or what you’re offering changes.

My advice to any designer struggling to convince a Product Manager to do the right thing for their customers is to talk through what the longer term implications of a particular decision could be and to ask them whether this will help them meet their goals in the long-run.

A product only exists to satisfy the needs of its customers, and if it’s not doing that, then it’s not a sustainable product.

User experience vs. business goals: finding the balance

Link - User experience vs. business goals: finding the balance (Ariel Verber on Medium)