What is UX design?

And why is UX design important for your website?

Put simply UX stands for ‘user experience’ and, in a nutshell, your website should be built by someone who understands at least the basics of UX design, so they can build your website, or UI (user interface), to be a delightful experience for your customers.

UX design is a brand experience

You should see the experience of using your website as an extension of your brand. A UX designer will consider the values inherent in your brand and translate these into the build and fabric of what it feels like to use your website.

For instance, are you a ‘friendly’ brand? Are you educating? Are you all about efficiency? Concern for the environment? Whatever the values and attributes of your brand, UX design will take these into account and design accordingly, so that the experience of using your website, feels like interacting with your brand.

UX design isn’t just about logos

Just as your brand is more than a logo. Your website needs to do more to embody your brand than simply be in the right colours and have your logo in a few places. Your customers will differentiate you from the competition by what it feels to interact with you. In the same way as they would by going into a shop, if the experience isn’t pleasing for them, they are unlikely to return.

‘Design thinking’ will aim to join UX and brand together to make sure the customers’ experience is relevant, easy and intuitive, according to your brand values.

Examples of what we mean by UX design

If your brand is all about inspiring customer confidence via your reliability and dependability, it is going to be important that your website has, for instance:

• Pages that load quickly
• Great usability
• Consistency of branding

A design-heavy website is likely to be slower to load, and even if it looks good, if it’s hard, and less than intuitive, to navigate, you are unlikely to be providing the experience your customer desires and associates with confidence.

Consistency of branding will also provide reassurance to your customer, aid their ease of navigation and help them to orientate their experience.

Live up to user expectations

It’s possible to overdo the promise in your branding, and have the UX let you down. Remember that consistency of experience is key. Be honest, authentic and trustworthy. Over-promising and under-achieving can be damaging to you.

The way to avoid thwarting user expectations is to test. Test, test and test again! It’s the only way you’ll know if the UX-designed website really is working for your customers. Testing is a hugely important area for UX design, simply due to the fact that designers, and business owners, can assume they know what a customer wants and what issues they want to solve, but without testing theories and solutions with real customers, these are only ever assumptions.

Web developers are technical, and business owners have their own perspective too, but they are not the perspectives of users and customers. Testing is the only way to test UX design and the assumptions the design is built on.

It’s a balance

Above all, a good UX design needs to balance website aesthetics and technicality with users’ needs for ease of use, satisfaction and engagement, and in a way that all adheres, reinforces and promotes the brand values. It sounds simple right? A good UX designer will help you by talking to you about your brand, recognising your values and translating them into the online experience they build for you.

< Read more articles on our Web Academy