What is User Experience?
Simply, User Experience (UX) is the experience a user has when visiting your website. Can they do what they want to do? How easy is it? Do they leave with a feeling of frustration or satisfaction, pain or delight?
What is User Experience Design?
Exactly what it sounds like! User Experience Design (UXD) is the process of crafting the user's experience. Making sure we understand their needs and yours, and that they can find everything they want, do what they want to do, and enjoy doing so. As a result, they should leave feeling better about your company than when they arrived.
What do we do?
As so often happens, to achieve a simple aim is a relatively complex process, that could be summarised as understand, design, test, improve, build and refine:
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Requirements gathering & analysis
We find out about you and your users, what your business aims and your user's wishes are. -
Information architecture
We work with you to define what content is needed, the structure and organisation that best fits that content and the terms used to label it, in a way that makes sense to your users. -
Interaction design
Once we have designed the structure for your content, we move on to the structure of the pages themselves and how the user interacts with them. -
Functional prototyping
We take these page structures and interactions and knit them together to create a functioning prototype, which is then used in testing and development to make sure the site is easy to use and that the final product matches the design. -
Usability testing
It is essential to perform some kind of testing of the design – this can range from an expert review by another member of the UX team or external agency, through quick ad-hoc user testing or online testing to full, lab based testing with multiple subjects. The results of this will always be areas for improvement, which lead to steps 2-5 being repeated until you are happy with the results. -
Visual design
Once the interaction design and architecture has been completed, we move on to the look and feel – how your brand is communicated, and how visual treatment is used to communicate further meaning to the user. This can also be subjected to user testing if needed. -
Front end development
Once all this is complete, our design team make the page templates using semantic, accessible HTML and CSS to pass on to our development team, who create the fully functioning website, usable by anyone and readable by search engines. Once again, testing by users can be carried out at this point.
How does it benefit you?
Your users will find your website easy to use and understand, and will be able to complete whatever task they arrived to do. And they will leave happier, with a better perception of you than they arrived with. You get value for money and meet your business aims.
A few real-world examples;
- In 2006 we re-designed the website for Best Western Hotels in the UK – this resulted in 58% more online sales and an increase in conversion rates from 3% to 5%
- Starting in 2008 we re-designed The Co-operative bank's online application forms for a range of products. The increase in conversion rates as a result is up to 70%, and we are still delivering improvements through continual statistical analysis and testing.