Benefits of user experience research and design

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Employing UX techniques to better understand your users' needs and deliver services that meet their expectations has benefits throughout the development cycle and on into service management.

Measuring the impact of change in user behaviour can lead to significant returns on investment. 

Some key benefits we see in projects we have worked on:

• Increased customer satisfaction by avoiding building things that audiences don't want.
• Reduced user support overheads because products and processes are easier to use and optimised for self service.
• Distributed time savings across the University as it becomes quicker to perform tasks.
• Reduced development costs, getting more right first time through better communication and specification.
• Greater assurance of legislative compliance such as accessibility and data privacy.

Staff in the UX Service routinely support major projects relating to:

• Learn - the University's virtual learning environment, used by thousands of students and staff members
• EdWeb - the University's web publishing platform used to publish pages across the University web estate

You can read more about these pieces of work and other work we support in our blog posts: 

Website and Communications blog 

If you would like to request our services or advice, please contact us by emailing user-experience@ed.ac.uk