Are you wondering what UX design is? UX stands for User Experience.  This blog post helps you to understand some basic principles of user experience design, so keep reading.

What is UX design? UX Definition

As stated at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design), “User Experience design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.”

In layman terms, user experience takes into consideration many elements in order to ensure user satisfaction and a user positive experience when interacting with your website.  Therefore a website needs to be:

• Useful, as it needs to fulfil the user needs
• Usable (easy to use) and Findable (easy to navigate)
• The design needs engage emotionally
• Accessible (for users with disabilities)
• Credible and Trusting

The UX honeycomb by Peter Morville

Elements of User Experience

In order to achieve the best user experience, Jesse James Garrett developed a framework in 2000 which divides the development process into 5 elements:

1. Strategy

The strategy takes into consideration the business objectives and more importantly the user needs, capacities, expectations and motivations.

2. Scope

Following the strategy, the scope defines the features, functions and content within the website.

3. Structure

Once we have defined the functions, features and content we are able to define the interaction design (how the user will interact with the website) and information architecture (arrangement of the content).

4. Skeleton

The skeleton defines the information, interface and navigation design which facilitates an easy understanding, navigation and interaction with the website.

5. Surface

The surface level is taken into consideration by the way the website feels and looks.

Source: The Elements of User Experience

UX testing and metrics

There are many tests and resources available to monitor and ensure a great user experience. We can perform usability testing, heat maps, web analytics, a/b testing, etc.

It is important also to get users feedback by performing interviews or surveys with your customers.

Some of the metrics that can be used are shown in the diagram below.

Source: Choosing the Right Metrics for User Experience

Benefits of UX

So now that you know what UX design is, we can analyse the main benefits of incorporating user experience in our designs.

A good user experience will not only make your users happier, it will also:

• Increase conversion. A deeper understanding of the users will give you the key on how to make them convert on your site.
• Improve self-service. As it is easier to navigate and find what the user is looking for, the user becomes more independent. Users prefer self-service because it saves time, it is convenient and brings flexibility.
• Benefit SEO. Search engines take into consideration the user interactions with the resulting website after performing a search query. For this reason, a good user experience will increase traffic to your site.
• Increase loyalty. When visiting a website with a bad user experience, you simply will never come back. However, if the experience has been satisfactory you will most likely continue to visit this website – continuing to buy the offered products/services and promoting it with your friends.

Thanks for reading once again.  At The Web Centre we always take into consideration your target market as well as your business objectives when creating all our websites.

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