What is UX Design?

In a nutshell, UX Design is short for "User Experience Design"; but what does it actually entail?

UX Design has been around since the 1940s and initially looked at the interaction between human users and machines. It then expanded into overall product design, ensuring that users got the most out of a product and it's use was as instinctive as possible. In other words, how to make a product easy and a pleasure to use. With the advent of website design, we started using the term UX Design for the process of ensuring a website had a great user experience. Specifically, UX Design is improving user satisfaction by looking at the usability, accessibility and efficiency of user interaction.

So before we look at what makes a good user experience, let's look at what makes a bad user experience.

What is a bad user experience?

In UX Design, we consider the following to lead to a bad user experience on a website.

Slow loading web pages
Confusing navigation with no obvious structure to the website
Poor graphics and overall look of the website
Key content hidden below large banners and unneccessary sections
Non-responsive, so design doesn't work great on smaller screens
Distracting components that don't add value to the visitor
Content that is hard to read
Pages overloaded with unneccessary content

There is more, but you get the idea.

So what makes good UX Design?

A good user experience means the visitor can get what they need from your website easily. So that means we need to start with understanding exactly what the visitor is wanting from your website. Are they looking for confirmation you can help them and then contact you or buy your product? Are they looking for information? Are they looking for specific products? Or maybe a combination of all these things.

Once you are clear on what your visitors want on your website, you then design the site to ensure this is delivered. If they want to know if you service their area and then book you, ensure that the service area is top of the page with obvious means to contact you. If they are looking for information, ensure that the info is front and centre of the page and easy to find.

How do we improve UX Design?

The obvious way to test your users' experience, is to ask them. This is obviously not an easy project and most likely suited to larger businesses that can afford to set up research projects. Fortunately, there are easier ways to improve your user experience.

Get your website designed by experienced digital marketing companies that understand UX Design
Use tools like Heat Mapping and Screen Recording to watch how visitors interact with your website
Review your website analytics for negative statistics, like bounce rate and time on site.
Perform split tests to see if different designs work better

UX Design is a critical part of digital marketing. There is no point spending time, money and effort on driving visitors to your website only for them to leave due to a really poor user experience.