Our 10 tips for working on your UX design

What is the Concept of UX Design?

Definition of UX Design (or User Experience Design)

You don't go to the movies just for the popcorn, just like amusement parks aren't just about the souvenirs you can buy there. What matters is the experience. And that's precisely what UX design aims for: creating a sensation, a pleasant experience when using an interface or, more broadly, during any physical or virtual interaction with a company.

Even though the term UX is often linked to website or mobile app design, it applies to all touchpoints an individual can have with a brand. Navigation, accessibility, ergonomic design, emotion: all these elements must work together to provide a positive user experience.

The objective? Create an intuitive, reliable, practical, and fast interface that meets users' needs. Take a website for example—UX will allow you to:

• Make it accessible and easy to use, through ergonomics, appearance, and simple, clear functionalities

• Adapt it to different digital devices, whether it's a smartphone, tablet, or large screen

• Ensure reliability, through its use that reassures and the security elements put in place for internet users

You must keep in mind that experience and the feelings associated with it are subjective and constantly evolving. Each individual's perception and past will inevitably influence their use of an interface, like a website.

The Origins of UX Design

The concept of UX isn't as recent as it appears. It dates back to 1988, with Donald Norman, who introduced the idea in his book The Design of Everyday Things. He explains that design should be thought of according to user needs, not based on what companies deem relevant. In 2002, Jesse James Garrett deepened this notion in The Elements of User Experience. He identifies 5 essential stages:

1. Strategy: Think about user needs while considering company objectives

2. Scope: Identify potential difficulties

3. Structure: Organize collected data

4. Wireframe: Design the interface framework

5. Surface: Create the final design

This approach forms the foundation of an effective UX approach, to be adapted according to project needs.

What's the Difference Between UX Design and UI Design?

These two terms are sometimes confused. But they're two different domains, though complementary, because they don't have the same subject of study: UX design involves observing and evaluating the feelings users have toward an interface.

On the other hand, UI (or User Interface) deals with graphic elements and represents the finished aspect of an interface. It focuses on choosing colors, used typography, element structure, etc. We're talking about visual identity here.

But UI alone doesn't allow designing an optimal user experience. Indeed, a UI designer only considers the visual and aesthetic part of an interface. It should be pretty, attract visitors, and be consistent with the company.

Meanwhile, UX design is work aimed at improving user experience while considering UI elements but also structure, user research, analysis, content, accessibility, etc. It's UX that feeds on UI.

💡 Good to know: UX is a discipline dealing with user research and analysis with the goal of offering the best possible user experiences. The designer handles the creative part of the project and adds graphic elements.

Some people specialize only in UX and only touch the research, testing, and data evaluation part. While the UX designer thinks about user experience by integrating the design part into the process.

Why Work on Your User Experience?

Knowing that 7 out of 10 internet users won't return to a website if their first visit wasn't a complete success, we realize that working on UX is essential if we want to convert and retain maximum prospects! And for that, users must keep a pleasant memory of their visit to your interface.

Concretely, UX design will study user motivations. And how to meet their expectations. The objective is to understand their needs and provide them with solutions based on collected data, to gain:

• Better conversion rate

• Better-worked SEO

• More adapted brand image

• More effective customer loyalty

Additionally, you'll better understand your users, so they can quickly get the hang of the interface and understand what you expect of them. Otherwise, they risk quickly leaving your site, application, or software, which will impact your conversion rate. And we don't want that!

You must therefore constantly keep in mind the UX elements to integrate at each stage of your project and ensure that design and user experience are integral parts of your acquisition strategy.

On one hand, this will help you reduce the risk of failure and avoid costly redesign. And on the other hand, you can reduce bounce rate by identifying why visitors leave your site. You'll thus increase your sales and market share: a significant return on investment. All while improving customer satisfaction!

10 Tips for Working on Your Website's UX

Think Persona

Identifying your buyer persona and learning about your target audience is good practice for any comprehensive strategy. For your interface to properly meet user expectations, you must be attentive to the slightest remarks and feedback.

It should provide positive emotions to your visitors and give them answers to their problems. In this regard, don't hesitate to research via social media, blogs, forums, etc. You can thus collect precious information.

By knowing their age, social class, job, interests, etc., you'll manage to design a project that corresponds to them. Each page should be thought of according to and for your users:

1. Colors: be careful not to scatter too much

2. Typography: readable font that's not too small

3. Vocabulary: the tone you want to use

4. Animations: without overusing to not disturb users

5. Visuals: to capture your visitors' attention

6. Icons: visible and useful for user understanding

Create an Effective Wireframe

The Wireframe is your interface's framework, essential for structuring your ideas before moving to final design. It allows visualizing element arrangement, clarifying information architecture, and ensuring smooth user flow. By laying solid foundations, you avoid costly errors during development and facilitate communication with your team.

To be effective, keep your Wireframe simple and functional. Focus on key element placement: menus, buttons, text areas, while prioritizing ergonomics and intuitiveness. Tools like Figma or Adobe XD can help refine your ideas, but a simple paper sketch can suffice to start.

A well-thought Wireframe evolves with user feedback and testing. By designing it with clarity and logic, you'll lay the foundations for an interface capable of meeting your audience's expectations.

Get to the Essentials

Honestly, can you stay focused long enough on a screen to capture all the information there? I can't. So you have very little time to convince a visitor to be interested in your offer!

That's why it's important to get to the essentials when talking about your missions and what you can bring to your potential clients. You must visibly display important information on your interface.

But be careful not to overload your pages. What matters here is that your users can quickly understand the message you want to convey. For this, you can use white space, which will highlight your content and elements. Your visitors will then have more ease reading and assimilating your message.

Also ensure your colors and animations are appropriate and don't disturb visitors in their reading.

Respect Hierarchy and Process

It's necessary to establish hierarchy among your different elements, at the risk of your users getting lost among your content. This involves establishing size for your different texts and visuals according to the importance you give them.

Let's take an example. You'd never put a page title and a paragraph at equal size. That's logical!

However, when you have many elements to display on your interface, it's not easy to create harmonious and understandable space. The idea is then to properly hierarchize information: primary / secondary / optional, etc.

And to properly differentiate this information, it's necessary to use different sizes/shapes/typography styles, different colors, different placements, etc. And try playing with visuals (sizes, saturation, shapes, etc.).

Facilitate Navigation

Your project must be built logically if you want to capture your visitors' attention. They shouldn't get lost in your interface's meanderings and should be able to return to safe harbor if needed. In short, they must be able to navigate easily.

The goal isn't for them to find themselves with multiple open pages without managing to find what they're desperately looking for. You'd end up with confused visitors and an inglorious bounce rate.

Navigation on your site is the means for your users to reach the objective they'd set and find the answer to their needs. It must therefore help users move easily and quickly on your interface.

That's also why menus exist! It's somewhat your control point—it allows redirecting visitors to your different pages.

Optimize Loading Speed

Loading speed is also an important criterion in UX. Today, consumers want everything immediately. You can imagine that a page taking more than a few seconds to load won't fly.

On the contrary! You risk losing your visitors, who'll prefer to go research, and buy, elsewhere. Especially since they're unlikely to return soon to your interface if it didn't satisfy them in terms of experience.

So what about such an experience? Your users risk getting annoyed—even with the best connection, a non-optimal interface will have much longer loading time. But solutions exist:

1. Opt for qualified hosting

2. Reduce your visual sizes

3. Optimize your animations

4. Simplify your code, etc.

If you want to verify your site's loading speed yourself, Google offers a tool specifically designed for this: PageSpeed Insights. So fire up your search engines and test yourself!

Add Links and CTAs

A CTA (or Call To Action) is an action button strategically placed, most often on a website. Their goal is to tell visitors what to do: subscribe to a newsletter, request a demonstration, schedule an appointment, etc.

The objective is to convert your prospects into leads. Because you could have a beautiful interface aligned with your brand guidelines and worked user experience, but if your calls-to-action are poorly thought out, you won't get expected results.

Links are also essential to your interface: they'll allow your users to navigate with a single click. As a bonus: you can add as many as you want.

However, keep in mind that although external links and incoming links are very important, you shouldn't neglect your internal linking. But generally, you have free rein regarding link insertion.

Handle 404 Errors

We don't think about it often enough, but the 404 page is an important element to consider for optimal user experience. Indeed, if you decide to remove a page from your interface that users wanted to visit, they'll necessarily land on a 404 page.

Unfortunately, if it's not sufficiently thought out and worked on, you'll lose visitors and potential prospects. So put everything into this page! The most important thing is guiding your users to another page likely to interest them.

For example, if a visitor clicks on a blog article but lands on a 404 error, don't hesitate to highlight a call-to-action to lead them to read another article related to their interest topic.

The interest of a 404 page is to influence users to take other paths if the initially planned one is no longer relevant.

Create a Responsive Web Interface

Today, many of your users will visit your interface via smartphone or tablet. To facilitate their user experience, it's essential that your project be designed responsive so it can adapt to different screen formats.

If your interface isn't adapted for small formats, your users will be dissatisfied with the proposed user experience. You must therefore think about making all your elements responsive (menu, visuals, texts, etc.).

A worked and functional user experience must consider different possible devices.

Maintain Your Footers

Let's imagine. You find THE perfect outfit for your date, but you don't have adequate shoes. What a shame—you won't make a very good impression. For an interface, the idea is the same. Its design can be perfect, but if the footer is neglected, you'll make a bad impression.

The goal is to give navigation references to your users to improve their experience by adding links to your important pages, like the contact page. Indeed, it would be a shame if your visitors couldn't contact you before leaving your site. You must therefore display your contact information (email, address, and phone). These are essential elements for converting your visitors and facilitating access to you and your company.

Do Research and Testing

We'll always come back to this: the user. The UX approach is built on data and statistics. They'll help you optimize your interface and build the most optimal user experience!

With the objective of finding your visitors' problems/needs and what will work best for your project, you can implement several tests:

1. A/B testing: a method allowing testing two variations for a product or service to know which would suit best. By testing different ergonomics, layout, functionalities, etc., you can compare your ideas

2. Heatmap: the objective here is to record your users' screens and analyze their navigation. Thus, you can observe barriers and obstacles blocking your visitors and resolve them quickly

3. User tests: user tests allow observing visitor behaviors toward your interface with a pre-established scenario

Testing your solution is one of design thinking's five phases (define, imagine, synthesize, prototype, test). It's essential for obtaining ideal user experience.