Today, many factors are involved when interacting with a customer via a website.
Indeed, nowadays, it is fundamental for companies and brands to be aware of these factors in order to create and deliver to the user the best possible interaction and experience on their website.
So, on the internet, everything revolves around this famous user experience.
If this experience is positive, the company will be able to ensure the loyalty of its customers who will then come back to the site.
On the other hand, if it is bad, there is a very high chance that the user will not come back and will turn to the competition with the hope that they will offer a better experience.
As a result, companies have started to pay more attention to the design of their website, and all the other details related to it.
This is how the terms UX, UX design and UI among others emerged, because they take into account all the factors that make a website attractive or not.
We will therefore discuss several of these terms below so that they make more sense to us focusing on UX and more precisely on UX design.
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Let’s start: What is UX and what does UX stands for?
UX is an acronym for user experience. This term created by Donald Norman has existed since the early 90's when he was a cognitive scientist at Apple. Interested in all aspects of the user's experience with a product or service, Donald Norman defined the different elements that determine how a user feels when interacting with a product as user experience or UX.
The UX definition can then be simplified as every element of a user’s interaction with a website and application, with the goal of positively influencing your users’ attitudes and emotions towards your product.
Good UX is all about ensuring your customers and users feel satisfied by the website or app interface of your company.
However, in this article we will focus more on UX Design.
So… What is UX Design?
UX Design (User Experience Design) is a design method centered on the user.
At least that's how UX Design is most commonly defined. However, User Experience Design is not limited to this simple definition and includes many dimensions.
How could we define a good user experience applying UX design to a website?
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Making it accessible and easy to use thanks to its ergonomics, its appearance, its coherent design and its intuitive features
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Making it credible, through its use that reassures
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Making it compatible, i.e. usable by users whatever the digital support (Smartphone, tablet, large screens...).
The fundamental basis of UX design has always been focused on human beings (users) and their needs. Seems apparent from the name itself, but at times researchers and designers lose sight on how good it sounds to “put yourself in the users’ shoes” without actually rationalizing the meaning.
Designing human-centered new services and products or improving existing ones with actual people in mind, is essential to assist them and companies to adapt quickly and over time.
UX Design can thus be defined as all the means implemented to design an interface that fully meets the requirements of a good UX. The goal is to provide the best possible user experience.
However, as we said before, user experience design has many interpretations and definitions, the experts don't actually rely on one of them but accept several.
What’s the difference between UX Design and UI Design?
UI is the abbreviation for User Interface and is related to the graphic environment in which the user of a website, software or application evolves.
When we talk about UI design, we are talking about the direct link between the user and the machine, which can be a web platform or a program.
Several elements are involved in this connection, such as font, color, typography, size, visuals, intuitiveness and editorial guidelines.
When an interface has a nice, easy-to-use design, it leads to a great user experience. The complementarity between UI design and UX design is thus apparent.
In the world of ergonomic interface design, we frequently speak of UX for user experience design and UI for graphic design.
Sometimes, these two notions specific to UX Design and its fields get confused, even though they represent two specific and therefore different disciplines.
And if UX is a complete design process and moreover includes UI, these two terms are not really assimilated. Neither from a theoretical point of view, nor from a practical point of view.
However, these two concepts cannot be dissociated. Their complementary relationships mean that these two fields are intertwined.
If the UX designer focuses essentially on the emotional and psychological aspect of the user experience, while the UI designer focuses on all the ergonomic and practical elements used to create an interface, the fact remains that UI needs to be complemented by the UX approach in order to think about and design an interface that is fully centered on users.
UX design and UI design go hand in hand, and the design of the product interface has a huge impact on the overall user experience.
A UI design approach consists in taking a variety of actions in order to create a dynamic user interface. One of these actions is the development or adaptation of the visual identity.
In a UI design approach, we also focus on the layout of content elements. For example, we can focus on a hierarchy of the site's content or work to ensure that there is a certain consistency.
It is also worth noting that in this approach, interactions, such as micro-animations and effects, must be designated. The same goes for the application of usability principles.
For more information about UI Design, visit What’s The Difference Between UX And UI?
The final goal is to provoke an emotion in the user.
Furthermore, UX Design refers to the analysis of the user's experience when using a web interface, a mobile application or an interactive software. Thus, one of the major differences between UX and UI Design is that they are two different disciplines, as they do not have the same object of study.
This way, to provide a good user experience to their customers throughout the buying process, companies need both UX and UI designers to design optimized websites and applications.
Why is UX Design important for a website?
To understand to which extent UX design is important, you should know that out of 10 Internet users, 7 do not return to a site if their first experience was bad.
It is therefore necessary to work on improving the UX if the goal is to offer the users a pleasant and unforgettable experience.
It is particularly important to make sure that the user understands very quickly what you expect from him. Otherwise, they will leave very quickly, which will obviously have a negative impact on your sales, if you have an online store.
To improve the user experience of your site, you must therefore call upon a UX specialist. He will make sure that the design and the user experience are directly integrated in a strategy aiming at transforming the needs into functionalities.
Need UX Design for your company? Let us help you and show you how you can implement UX Design in your projects!
What is the UX Designer role?
The job of the UX Designer consists of improving the user experience, making it pleasant and useful. To do this, he applies an approach focused on the user experience: UX Design.
The role of the UX designer is to intervene during the entire process of designing the interface, very upstream but also downstream, by testing at each stage.
He is interested in ergonomics, usability, but even more in the quality of the experience in all its dimensions. In other words, the UX Designer takes into account the user's needs and translates them into the interface.
To do this and achieve a satisfactory result, he has some steps to follow:
- Understand: What do users and customers need and want, their challenges and problems.
- Analyze: Taking the research that was made when understanding the customer and make sense to that information, where to invest time and money to have a greater impact on the customer.
- Ideate: Come up with ideas. How can we solve the customer problem?
- Validate: Test and validate the ideas of step 3 to choose the best and more adapted ideas to solve the problem.
- Iterate: Happens all the way through the process. When advancing through the 4 steps presented before, it is important to always go back to the customer to check if their needs have changed or to conduct more research.
Now that we have covered the most important points of UX design, we will analyze a few examples in order to provide a better understanding of this concept.
Good and bad examples of UX Design
Nowadays, we are very often exposed to multiple examples of UX Design, whether it is through social networks, music listening applications or even vacation planning.
Indeed, every time we enter a smartphone application or scroll through a website, we are confronted with UX design.
Therefore, we will now analyze two different examples of good UX design to understand more precisely what it is and evaluate its results. We will also provide a “bad UX design example” to better understand what mistakes are not to be made.
Airbnb
Our first example is Airbnb. This company has done a wonderful job with its UX Design because it offers the user a very minimalist and clear website and smartphone application design while giving a lot of information to the user, which is not easy.
Moreover, Airbnb has also created its own font: Cereal which gives a young and fun identity to its virtual platforms.
In this way, the company manages to offer its users a unique and at the same time exciting experience so that he/she can find an accommodation to go away for a weekend with the family or on vacation for example.
Disney+
Another example of good UX design is Disney+. This multinational company has been able to ensure at this level by offering the user a platform on which it is easy to interact, allowing the user to filter his searches and add content to favorites among other things, but also thanks to the prevention of errors.
In fact, Disney was clever when creating its Disney+ platform, knowing that the user would mainly use it on his smart TV, it wanted to facilitate the task of writing to the telecommand.
To do this, the Disney+ platform has included in its keyboard the keys "@gmail.com", "@hotmail.com" among others to save time to the user and facilitate the task of registration or log in on the platform while avoiding common typing errors such as "@gnail.com".
Although this may seem like a very basic function, it is very practical for the user and makes the experience of interacting with the platform more pleasant and simple while avoiding frustrations.
What not to do in UX Design?
We are now going to give an example of bad UX design to understand what mistakes are not to be made and the impacts that this can have on the user and therefore the company.
We will take the example of an online website that sells pairs of shoes.
When the user goes to this site, no filter is available to apply to his search, so the user cannot filter his search according to the model of shoe he wants, the color or the size.
Therefore, he is forced to browse the entire page from top to bottom to find the pair of shoes that suits him.
Now imagine that this site has more than 300 pairs of shoes for sale, the user will spend a lot of time scrolling to finally find the shoes he wants without even being sure that they will be available in his size.
Let's imagine that after spending several minutes looking for a pair of shoes and finally finding it, the user adds it to his cart, but the site asks him to create an account.
For this, the user has to fill in about twenty boxes that will allow him to create his account.
Let's also imagine that pop-ups with ads appear on the screen frequently, the frustrated user will then drop his pair of shoes and will not buy them, he will go instead to a competitor.
In this way, this example of a bad user experience allows us to understand how important UX Design is for the consumer's buying experience or any other experience he will have on a website or application.
This is why companies should not neglect their UX design because if it’s not good, it will cost the company the loss of potential customers.
UX: a world where all industries belong
The industries sectors impacted by UX design are very diverse and varied as today most of the companies belonging to various industries use UX design.
That is, any company or brand that has a virtual presence such as a website or an application will be affected by UX design because it will determine whether the user experience when using the virtual platform has been positive or negative.
In this way, some of the examples of industry sectors are banks or financial companies, brands of clothing, shoes, accessories, goods, etc. that sell their products online, streaming platforms, e-learning websites and applications, etc...
In other words, it could be said that every industry having a virtual platform, whether it is an application or a website available to the consumer is impacted by UX design.
Need UX Design for your company? Let us help you and show you how you can implement UX Design in your projects!