Employees rely on various tools and applications as part of their everyday life at work. Unfortunately, far too many of these tools simply aren’t user-friendly. Poorly designed user interfaces drag down morale, increasing turnover and wasting vital human capital. They also prevent companies from making strategic decisions at the lightning pace that today’s environment demands.
But you don’t have to fall into this trap. Ensuring that user interfaces are streamlined and intuitive will boost employee satisfaction and ultimately your company’s bottom line.
Improve Morale
In an ideal world, every employee would arrive at the office fired up and ready to achieve greatness. But, in reality, though, you can’t just sit back and hope that your team is happy and inspired. That’s why the best CEOs make considerable investments in recruitment, onboarding, training, and retention.
Given all that effort, it is easy to take user interfaces for granted – but they’re a critical piece of the engagement puzzle. The truth is that nobody likes feeling that their time is being wasted. If your people spend their workday struggling with slow, buggy, inefficient technology that just doesn’t do what they need it to do, they will get bored and resentful. Eventually they may leave for other opportunities.
Let’s say your employees need to know when the price of oil drops or spikes – and they need this information on an hourly basis, because it affects profits. Checking oil prices via some convoluted process may feel like a necessary part of the job, but that’s just because everyone got used to old technology.
Instead, you could provide them with an easy-to-use dashboard that includes the price of oil at the top, without a lot of scrolling up and down or left and right. Seeing all the information they need right on one screen would save your staff time and aggravation. We typically integrate simple encouraging messages like, “Congratulations! You have successfully completed your budget!” to give users a little pat on the back.
Another side effect of outdated, frustrating technology is employee burnout. Too often, business leaders don’t realize that their demands are unreasonable with the tools that are in place. Pushing people to meet unrealistic deadlines leads to exhaustion and an unhealthy work/ life balance. Even if you don’t see an increase in turnover, your company could get a reputation for being an awful place to work.
Rethinking the interfaces that your employees use day-to-day will show your team that you value their time. And, as everyone knows, time is money.
Save Money and Increase Profits
It’s obvious that in order for your service or product to succeed, the customer has to have a good experience. Sadly, at many large organizations, the employee’s user experience is not given the attention it deserves.
Employees’ user experience is something that companies ignore at their peril. Poor interfaces waste money, while great interfaces have the power to drive up productivity and profits. Here are just a few examples of the benefits you and your company can expect from improved user interfaces:
- You’ll be able to make well-informed business decisions faster, because you have the data you need. You are not waiting for the right reports to be compiled. In addition, those reports will be more accurate and reliable, due to fewer opportunities for human error.
- Spending less time on data entry and other busywork will free people up to advance other priorities, like new initiatives and long-term strategic plans. That means more meaningful work will get done with the same number of FTEs.
- Well-designed solutions allow your team to be more innovative and creative — all while lowering overhead. The result? A fantastic ROI.
- Your company will save money on training and onboarding. When new people don’t have to learn convoluted, broken software (and the work-arounds for that software), they can be brought up to speed much faster.
When you’ve already invested in a particular solution, tweaking what you have may seem like the most cost-effective approach. But trying to fix technology that your people hate is just throwing good money after bad. In many cases, the technology was never going to work the way the salespeople promised anyway!
Sometimes the best way forward is to cut your losses and invest in a new solution that truly meets your company’s needs and makes your people happy. Contact a good UI designer, who can review your current interfaces and make suggestions for improvement.