UX is a term thrown about by techies these days and often sounds like a complex and abstract idea. So, what does it actually mean? And what does it mean to you as an SME?
User experience (UX) is about having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations. It also takes into account business goals and objectives. UX best practices promote improving the quality of the user’s interaction with and perceptions of your product and any related services. On your website, for example, the experience a user has when navigating, consuming content, buying and then using your product or service needs to be as good as possible. To achieve this, it requires understanding who those users are, what they like and find easy and engaging.
At the centre of UX is the intention to ensure users find value in whatever you are providing to them. Both your content and the structural design of your website will play a huge part in UX. Here are some principles central to an effective user experience:
- Useful: Your content should be original and fulfil a need
- Usable: Your website should be easy to use
- Desirable: Image, identity, brand, and other design elements should evoke emotion and appreciation
- Findable: Your content needs to be easy to locate and navigate both onsite and offsite
- Accessible: Your content needs to be accessible to people with varying ability levels – this will depend largely on your target audience
- Credible: Users must trust and believe what you deliver
Why should you care?
Whether we realise it or not, we all have a ‘user experience’ with every website we use every day. Albeit sometimes subconsciously, we gravitate towards the websites we have had a positive experience with previously and use them more often. Put simply, the businesses with the best UX on their website will likely make more sales. Making it easy and enjoyable for someone to visit our site, engage with us and buy from us will inevitably accelerate revenue.
UX is a hugely detailed concept but the above serves as an introduction. Further reading on this topic can be found online. A professional web developer will consider user experience as a key component to delivering an effective website, whatever your business goals.
Webizzy is a Web Design agency which has been established for almost 10 years. To find out about improving your website, get in touch.
