How a bad design can cost you the Earth apart from being ugly?

A bad design hurts your business. This is a well-known fact. But what is unknown is, a bad design hurts your business in many different ways and it can cost you dearly, not just in monetary terms but also in the numbers of your customers.

The cost of a bad design is devastating and has far-reaching consequences. Let us go step by step as to how deeply it can affect your business as a whole.

Brand

Your brand is the identity of your business and it is what people relate to you by. Half of the customer loyalty you retain is due to the brand you carry forward. Having said this, logo plays a vital role in the making of your business. It is how people know your business by. Take for example the logo of Apple. It is what people love it for.

A bad design or logo is unimaginative, confusing and boring. Also if you are re-branding, one needs to take utmost care and much thought has to be put into it as people are so familiar with the old designs. Several brands have increased sales and popularity while some have lost the same due to bad, unthoughtful re-designs. Like GAP and Tropicana. Earlier the gap logo was a bold G-A-P over a denim background, which changed into a small blue box over the letter P and it was not well perceived by people. Also, Tropicana’s logo featured Tropicana written in green with an orange drawn over. Merely a month after PepsiCo re-branded the Tropicana logo, it cost a whopping $137 million and the sales plummeted by 20%.

A logo has to be designed/redesigned keeping in mind user’s perceptions, demand and brand popularity.

User Experience

A business runs on its customers. If the website, app or game is slow, laggy and confusing it will immediately cause a negative impact on the customer. In this digital savvy world, where the attention span of average users is a mere 8 seconds, one cannot run the risk of a boring and buggy website and app design. Optimizing your companies web presence is important to draw page views. A bad user experience not only causes a business to lose customers but also causes a decrease in sales.

Impact on Sales

As mentioned earlier, a bad logo, poorly designed websites that are not thoughtful and user-friendly can prove expensive. Merely a month after PepsiCo re-branded the Tropicana logo, it cost a whopping $137 million and the sales plummeted by 20%.

It has been seen that design-centric organizations have gained huge traction and become profitable. Take for example the likes of Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Google, and Amazon. They have certainly retained customers owing to their hugely popular logos.