What is UX Design?

Does your website have a great user experience?

Have you ever been on a website that just sucks? Maybe you couldn't find the information you were after or had to click on multiple links to get to where you wanted to be. If you're like most of us, you probably just backed out of the website and clicked on the next one in your search results. So even though the website did all the hard work getting you to it, you ended up moving on to a competitor website. Does your business have one of these websites?

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 makes a bad user experience?

The main cause of a bad user experience is not being able to find what you are after, but there are many different reasons for that, including:

• The main menu is hidden
  Why should you have to go looking for a main menu or click on a button to reveal the menu when on a desktop computer?
• Confusing navigation with no obvious structure to the website
  Similar to the above point, website visitors don't want to stumble around on a website trying to find what they are after.
• Excessive popups
  Sure, sometimes a pop up is useful; but not when they pop up all over the place making it hard to read the page or navigate.
• No obvious contact details
  How do people get in touch? If you have a shopfront, then the address should also be obvious.
• Big banner images pushing the page content down
  Visitors shouldn't have to scroll down before they can start reading the main content.
• Website design is too busy
  Don't distract visitors away from what you want them to do. Where should they be looking?
• The website is ugly and hard to read
  Nothing worse then a website that looks ugly. Maybe a website that looks ugly and it's hard to read the text.
• Not mobile friendly
  Over half of visitors are using a mobile device; they shouldn't have to scroll horizontally to read the website.
• Slow loading web pages
  There is a clear correlation between how long people wait for a web page to load to leaving the website
• Page content that is hard to read due to bad font choice
  Don't make your font too small and the contrast with the background not enough to make it easy to read.

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.

These are just some of the examples, but I'm sure you're getting the picture.

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 to identify bad UX Design

The old fashioned way of testing UX Design was to give the website to users and stand there watching them use it. Thankfully, with technology, we can now do this a lot easier. There are 2 main solutions that are integral to UX Design.

Heat mapping

A heat mapping solution will track where visitors click on your website. It will then generate a heat map of the different pages showing what percentage clicked where. This is a good way to see which links they are using and which ones are being missed etc.

A variation on most heat mapping platforms is showing how far down the page the visitors scrolled. This is a good way to see how engaged they were with the page content etc.

Session recordings

These platforms actually record visitors on your website. It shows where they clicked, what pages they visited, how long they stayed on the site and more. It really is a great way to find sections that may have frustrated them. The recordings are often broken into different segments, such as those with multiple clicks on the same part of the site which would suggest broken links etc.

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.

Want a website with good UX Design?

At Smartyr Marketing our website designs start with thinking about how we expect visitors to interact with the website. We decide what is important for both the business and the visitor and ensure this is front and centre. So if you'd like to know more about good UX Design, why not find out how we can help. Simply call us on 1300 399 515 or fill in an  online enquiry form .