Why is UX as important as SEO?

As someone who is relatively new to the facinating world of I.T. and development, I have noticed how important SEO is to everyone. As an experienced businessman, however, I have discovered (with my wife’s help) the importance of UX Design.

I don’t need to detail the virtues of an SEO plan to anyone, as everyone seems to be much more up-to-speed than me. The importance of UX design is a sometimes overlooked element of applications that I think is critically important to any on-line application.

My wife, Catherine, runs a U.K. based Designer Radiator Retail company called Inspiration Radiators. Her sales are quite modest, however, she is ranked number 3 on ebay.co.uk for Designer Radiators. Her business has experience of UX design, although she didn’t know what to call it at the time. Below is an example of a typical example of a buy page in Ebay. A user can place a bid or buy-it-now and so on.

As sales grew, so did the number of products that the store had for sale. Putting these products into the ebay shop individually became very time consuming. As a result, my wife started to group some of the new products, allowing the user to choose the variation on the buy page, which is illustrated below.

I have added the red arrow to show the only difference in the two page types. “Why is this important?” I hear you ask. This small change, resulted in a 300% increase in sales for the items with variations versus the single item listings. It appears that users want as many of the final choices, regarding their purchase, to be left as late in the buying process as possible.

Dovetail understand that UX elements like those above, are critically important to the success of an application. Mossy Breen has invested time and energy becoming our in-house expert on UX Design, and is currently developing several next generation applications incorporating both SEO principals and UX Design principals.