This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 19, 2021 - April 25, 2021

User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) have become increasingly important to companies, be they large or small. Small companies, which do not have the might of a well-known brand, need to grab and keep their customer’s attention with a seamless and pleasant user experience. And as for the big companies, there could be even more at stake. 

Just ask Citigroup, which recently lost a US$500 million lawsuit because of a poorly designed banking interface. It mistakenly paid off a loan on behalf of its customer Revlon Inc, which had only wanted to restructure the loan. When it tried to get the money back, the judge ruled against the bank, although it had caught the problem just one day later. 

Tech website Ars Technica tracked down the issue to the poor UI design and confusing interface in the Oracle platform Flexcube used by Citigroup. It was a lesson in just how much could be at stake with poor UX and UI design.

“Good design is invisible and often backed by a lot of user [experience] research that happens behind the scenes,” says Alvin Chai, principal consultant of home-based UX research firm Netizen Experience. 

UX, as the name suggests, is the overall experience that users have when interacting with a product or service. Chai says there are three main elements to UX — utility, usability and desirability. 

Utility is about how useful the product is in meeting the user’s needs. Usability measures how user-friendly the product is and whether it is easy enough to navigate without outside help. This often overlaps, and is confused with UI, which is basically a subset of UX. Desirability relates to the look and feel of the product and how it has been designed to appeal to users. 

Chai says when conducting research about UX, it is important not only to look at the experience of using that particular app or website but how a person behaves before and after using it. “Looking at the entire user journey will help uncover many new business opportunities and identify unforeseen threats.”

He adds that there is no such thing as a perfect UX. Designers need to continue using research to refine their product.

“We always advocate the use of a data analytics tool when the product goes live so that we can keep track of the usage behaviour and UX performance constantly,” he adds.

Good UX facilitates the do-it-yourself model of the digital era. “It facilitates the self-serve model where users can complete tasks easily with digital tools, instead of having to go offline to complete the task or contact the support team for help.”

The pandemic has accelerated the need for digital transformation in businesses, and it has also pushed the need for UX to the next level, Chai adds.

Although companies in Malaysia now understand the importance of UX, some 10 years ago, when Netizen Experience was first introduced, they were not as receptive. “When we first started, even large local companies like banking groups and media conglomerates were not paying much attention to UX.” 

Netizen Experience, wholly-owned by Netizen Experience Sdn Bhd, is a home-based UX research and strategy consulting firm. Established in 2011, it provides UX consultancy services across Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines and conducts cross-border studies with partners from the US, Europe and Japan.

Initially, Chai says, Netizen Experience started with building software for remote UX research, gathering UX insights from end-users located anywhere in the world. However, most businesses at that time were not familiar with what UX research entailed. “Many of our clients wanted to consult [with us] and run their research as they lacked the know-how.

“In the past 10 years, we have conducted thousands of user research and user test sessions. Through our consulting work with enterprise clients, we’ve been able to serve millions of users,” he says. 

Local companies have not quite caught on. Chai observes a gap in how much they invest in UX compared with established companies. “All these big names have one thing in common — [they] put in a lot of resources to craft exceptional user experiences to make us stick with their platform.

“Many businesses, especially in Asia, are unable to provide user experiences that are on par with them. This is due to a lack of awareness of the benefits of having good UX and a lack of relevant skill sets to work on it,” says Chai.

Chai and his team work on educating Malaysian businesses about UX by putting up articles on Netizen Experience’s blog site and running corporate workshops. “We have to educate them on the benefits and ROI (return on investment) of UX,” he says.

For Chai, UX is a team sport. Therefore, businesses must invest in roles such as designers, researchers and product managers to keep up with the quality of UX required in the products. 

“Many companies try to hire just one UX/UI designer and expect the product UX to improve tremendously, which is unlikely to happen,” he says.

It is a chicken-and-egg situation. As long as employers are reluctant to hire more UX talent, it will keep locals from venturing into this field. But Chai thinks they need to upgrade themselves first to convince employers to hire them.

While a good UX is not cheap, a bad one costs even more, according to Chai. For instance, even if a company’s marketing team manages to generate a lot of traffic to the website, this effort goes to waste if once they get to the website, the experience is less than pleasant. And if this happens, users are less likely to recommend the products to potential customers.

Chai gives the example of a US e-commerce website that made new customers register before they could check out. This created unnecessary friction for new customers, many of whom abandoned their shopping carts. When this website took away the need to register for an account to proceed with checkout, the number of customer purchases went up a whopping 45% and the website saw an additional US$300 million in sales that year.

Is UX more relevant to some businesses than others? Not really, says Chai. It applies to all companies.

“Even if you do not have a digital interface, your offline customer experience still matters. For example, visiting the bank branch is an important part of the user journey.”

This year, Chai expects the ongoing digital transformation efforts to continue. Consumers will continue to expect hybrid services, including online and offline platforms for banking services, in the post-pandemic world. 

“The lines of both the online and offline worlds are blurred and will continue to converge. For example, certain banks now offer bank account openings without even entering the branch during the pandemic,” says Chai.

UX is a growing market in Malaysia and Chai is optimistic about Netizen Experience’s prospects. “This year, despite the ongoing pandemic, we are still expecting a healthy double-digit year-on-year revenue growth.”

Moving forward, Netizen Experience will continue to expand the scale of its remote UX services to serve different markets in the region, especially for its clients, which are expanding beyond Malaysia. It is also leveraging on the software tools it has developed in-house to increase operational efficiency, says Chai.

“While everyone is trying to digitise human services, Netizen Experience exists to humanise digital services. The firm prides itself on helping clients excel in the Asian market, be it for international giants, local or regional groups,” says Chai. 

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