What is user experience (UX)?

User experience is basically how someone feels while using a website, app, or product. For example, if a website is easy to navigate, loads without taking too long, and lets people find the information they need, they will have a better experience. But if things are confusing or don’t work properly, users may get frustrated and leave the site.

Whether or not you’ve ever heard the word UX, you’ve experienced UX. It’s the same as a checkout that takes 30 seconds, versus a checkout where you get frustrated and give up, or a menu you can read on your phone versus a menu you have to pinch and squint to see. For most visitors, the business isn’t the only place they’d ever tell others that they had received a business. They just leave.

Where the Term Comes From

Don Norman is a cognitive scientist and designer who is credited with popularizing “user experience” in the early 1990s. The point he was making was that it wasn’t all about the design and what it could do. It’s about the experience of the individual and the entire journey.

This continues to be the concept. UX is not just one screen, one feature, it’s how it feels when it’s all put together.

What Makes a Good User Experience?

Good UX usually comes down to a handful of qualities:

• Useful: It is helpful to somebody who uses it.
• Easy to use: It is user-friendly and can be used without instructions or guesses.
• Clear: Labels, Headings and Buttons are clear.
• Accessible: It is usable by people with various abilities, devices and connections, such as screen readers or a keyboard.
• Fast: Pages and actions are fast, waiting is a failure.
• Trustworthy: It is easy to use, predictable, and won’t lead users by the nose.

A site may earn a high score for looks, but may not score well on several of these. The second “first impression” is UX.

UX vs. UI vs. CX

These three terms are often mixed up, so here’s a quick way to separate them.

In short, UI is part of UX, and UX is part of CX. A business can have a beautiful interface and still deliver a poor experience if the steps behind it are confusing.

How UX Design Works

UX design is a repeatable process, not a flash of inspiration. Teams generally:

1. Learn about the users. So who are they, what do they want and what is holding them back?
2. Organize the content. Determine where to put things and where to look for them.
3. Sketch the layout. Wireframes are used to demonstrate the structure of each page, prior to any styling or design.
4. Build a prototype. A clickable draft allows users to experience the flow without going through the development process.
5. Test with real people. If a person tries to do something, they will reveal things that the team can’t see.
6. Refine and repeat. After launch cycle continues with fixes leading to new tests.

The crucial step is step five. What people really do is more important in the meeting room than what opinions they have.

Why UX Matters for a Small Business Website

For a business, a website will likely be the first point of contact for your customer. The right design means:

• More enquiries: Customers that easily find what they are looking for will engage more. That means more inquiries, booking and quote forms, and potentially sales.
• Fewer abandoned visits: Website visitors appreciate quick page loading and an optimized site for mobile devices.
• A more professional image: An organized website means you will be viewed as credible before the first word is even said.
• Better search visibility, indirectly: search engines are trying to rank pages of people who find useful. One thing that can be said to work against that is a site that irritates visitors, but a quick, mobile-friendly, well-organized one does work. Our post on the SEO benefits of responsive web design goes deeper.

Responsive design is one of the most visible parts of UX. If you haven’t read it yet, start with our guide to responsive web design basics and the key components of responsive design.

Common Website UX Mistakes

These come up again and again when we review business websites:

• Is it a menu that is too complex, or one that is too esoteric for those who don’t know a certain restaurant well?
• Highlighted buttons that are small, low-contrast or difficult to press.
• Forms that request unnecessary information are a bad idea.
• Slow loading pages due to large images.
• Text too small, too long and/or too difficult to scan
• Very difficult to read menus or prices in a PDF file when viewed on a cell phone.
• Any pop-up that obscures the content as soon as the page is accessed.Pop-ups that block the content when the page opens.
• Lack of clear direction about what to do next; visitors not knowing what they are looking for in the environment.

A Five-Minute UX Check You Can Do Today

You don’t need special tools to find the biggest problems:

1. Open your site on your phone. Are you able to read all and press all buttons, comfortably?
2. Try to complete one task. Call up, request, book or purchase. Count the steps.
3. Ask someone who doesn’t know your business to do the same thing while you watch without helping.
4. Check the speed. If pages are slow to you, they’re slower to visitors with poor connections.
5. Read your homepage as a stranger. Are you sure what you do and what to do next is obvious within a couple of seconds?

If any of these steps felt awkward, that’s UX feedback worth acting on.

When to Bring in a Professional

Small changes such as a more descriptive call to action or less intrusive forms can often be made quickly. But if you’re continually losing visitors or it’s been years since you’ve looked at your site, you’ll want to do a full review.

Technoz Software creates and develops websites for businesses in Surrey and all over the Lower Mainland. We design and develop our websites with the user in mind, and our SEO services work to ensure that the proper people end up finding our websites. Examples of this can be seen in our portfolio.