by Nick Fitzgerald
Simply put, User Experience Design (UX Design) is how a person interacts with your online presence and the feelings they experience when doing so.
Those feelings heavily influence a person's decision-making process, if they become frustrated or disorientated, trust is eroded. This could be through your website, mobile application or desktop software – any form of a human to computer interaction will benefit from a carefully considered UX.
UX shouldn't be confused with User Interface (UI). UI is the cousin of graphic design – if UX is the bones, UI is the flesh with a multitude of skin tones!
UI is the cherry on top of the design that defines colours, fonts and imagery. However, if the underlying UX is poor, it doesn’t matter how pretty the design is, people will have a bad experience interacting with your brand if they can’t digest your content efficiently. Our aim is always to achieve the most frictionless experience making your potential customer enjoy interacting with your brand.
Why is User Experience Important?
Our lives are bombarded with different companies, products or services vying for our attention and because of this our attention spans have been reduced to mere seconds. For example, how often have you left a website because the information you were searching for was not completely obvious from the outset? Or, you became frustrated when you had to sign up for an account on a website you would rarely use when trying to buy a gift for a friend? This is the essence of UX design – you have limited time to get your user to where they want to be.
Does the experience you are offering help the user complete their goal easily? If not you may lose out to a competitor that has a better user experience.
UX Design is NOT one size fits all
A great starting point into user experience is learning about your audience. Once you know who your users are you can make more educated assessments of their needs.
If budget allows, prototype testing will give you the best advantage of how your selected viewership reacts to your design. For example, if you are selling women’s shoes aimed at 18-30 year-olds, you would gather a focus group meeting these criteria and get them to test the design.
The easy trap to fall into is assuming you use your platform in the same way your users would.
Conclusion
Ultimately, an easier web presence to navigate will result in a higher level of customer satisfaction. This, in turn, gives the user a better feeling towards your brand and will result in more views and visits. eCommerce sites offering an excellent user experience will benefit from more profit and will keep customers coming back to the site to buy products or services (think of how often you shop on Amazon).
So there we have it, a user’s experience is extremely important to move your brand forward. If this is something you have been thinking about or want to chat further to see how me&you can improve your UX, then don’t hesitate to get in touch.
See more User Experience by me&you
Further Reading