If you have started to research redoing your website or replacing your spreadsheets with an online web solution, you have probably seen reference to UX. Find out what UX design is, and how your web development team can use it to improve the way your customers and staff interact with your website.
What is UX Design?
Have you ever gone to a website and struggled to find what you were looking for? Maybe the search bar was missing, or the drop-down menus were confusing. Perhaps the website didn’t work well with your mobile device or touch-screen laptop. Maybe things weren’t where you expected them to be, or text that looked like links didn’t go anywhere.
All these things are part of UX – user experience – and specifically, bad user experience. UX design is intended to remove those bad experiences by improving the way a person interacts with an online tool or website. In the words of Sari Kujala in Interacting with Computers on Oxford Academic:
“The goal of user experience design in industry is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”
UX vs UI: What’s the Difference?
Another acronym you may have seen in your internet searching is UI – user interface. This references the actual buttons, links, menus, and forms that a person uses to interact with your website. UI is related to UX in the sense that a customer has a user experience (UX) while interacting with your website’s user interface (UI).
For web developers, improving UX design partially involves adjusting UI elements (those buttons, links, and menus) to match users’ expectations and improve their user experience. But designing for an improved user experience goes far beyond simply rearranging your UI.
Why Business Owners Should Care About UX
For some business owners, it is hard to see the ROI on UX. Instead of a way to maximize profit or productivity, it just seems like so much alphabet soup. However, improving the experience can help people who are just browsing to become paying clients, and it can improve your internal workflow. All it takes is a little attention to UX design.
UX design is one of those behind-the-scenes issues. Business owners usually only hear about UX when it goes bad (like in the examples above). A smooth user experience may get you an occasional comment like “this website is so easy to use”, but for the most part, the results you see will be in the form of:
· Lower bounce rates (for people who quickly leave the site)
· Improved conversion rate from click to payment
· Decreased training and downtime for staff members learning the system
· Fewer order cancellations or modifications
· Reduced data entry errors
Understanding the UX Design Process
At Provisio Technology Solutions, we put good UX at the top of our priority list. When you sit down with us, we will help you identify what you want your website or online tool to do for you and then create a design that makes it easy for users, customers, and staff to do those things. Our goal is to put your value proposition front and center, and then smoothly guide users to the service, offering, or information they need to complete their experience.
Sometimes you are building an online tool for your staff to manage data entry or allow remote access to forms, data tables, or other shared resources. In these cases, we will often observe your staff’s current work process to help identify ways to improve their overall experience and make their work flow easier and more intuitive – to improve their UX.
We also include user testing in our UX design process. Once the frame of your website is ready to go, we put it in front of new users to see where they look for the tools, information, or products they need. If several people all have trouble with the same aspect of the site, our agile development process allows us to make changes early and keep the development of your project on track.
Good UX design can mean the difference between frustration and fruitfulness for customers and staff alike. Don’t cut corners on usability just to make your website look pretty. Meet with the team at Provisio Technology Solutions to make UX design an important part of your next online project. Contact us today to set up a meeting.