What is UX?
In recent years, UX has gone from being a design buzzword to a full-fledged, self-contained industry, and for good reason: it gets results, makes websites do what people want them to do and keeps customers happy.
Understanding what UX does is the key to getting the best out of your UX development and the first place to start with that is knowing what it actually is.
At its most basic, UX is a methodology of putting your users at the heart of what you’re trying to accomplish with design.
UX stands for user experience and is a set of practices and techniques, aimed around how best to guide your potential audience towards what you hope to gain from them.
How UX works.
For the most part, UX deals with organising information and processes on a website in the most efficient manner, for your target audience.
Step one of that process might well be, to identify who your target audience is; more than just marketing, different demographics will have a very different approach to navigating and interacting with websites and the services they provide.
UX will take idealised version of these demographics and find the route of least resistance, (and maximum gain).
The golden rules of UX.
There are several core pillars that UX designers will generally build from:
- The 3-click rule, which suggests that most users will leave a website if they can’t get what they want from it within three clicks
- The 5-second test, where users, will be tested on what information they pick up from a quick, (five seconds), browse of a site
- The 80/20 principle, based on the fundamentals of the Pareto Principle, which states that 20% of the features on a website, will drive 80% of the action that users choose to take
Know your audience.
Having a rough idea of your idealised users and knowledge of general browsing behaviours that, those users will follow, lets UX designers create precise journey maps that, you can build your site around.
Of course, these rules, give no guarantees, and there will always be outliers who don’t follow the same course everyone else would.
When dealing with large numbers though, it’s the majority who rule and finding the best way to guide that majority towards your goals, is the surest way to make your website work as efficiently as possible for you.
The best UX design agencies and development specialists make use of the full scope of resources available to them, to create the best possible user experience they can.
One moment, they’ll be crunching hard user data, the next referencing psychological handbooks, to find keys and triggers to help guide users to a satisfactory journey.
UX brings it all together.
Ultimately, while they don’t always have any particular say over the branding, coding, service, or, upkeep on your website, your UX specialist will be the architect that brings it all together and in many ways, will have the biggest impact on the experience and ultimate satisfaction of day-to-day users.
Taking their input and balancing it against technological and other considerations, is a process that should begin right at the start of the development schedule.
Once your site is up and running, it will be that much harder, to overhaul and change principle elements, so having a good UX specialist on board your development team, right from the start, can only be a good idea.
About The Author
Selina Murray is an International Consultant, for all things web and entrepreneurship.
She has worked on designing various websites for businesses for years now and loves researching newest technologies and processes.
Featured Image: rtsoftwaregroup.io
