The user experience (UX) design for your website is all about meeting your customers’ needs in a painless, positive manner – making it easy for your customers to navigate your website and work with you. Without good design users can be left unsatisfied, confused, and frustrated, making them more likely to turn their attention and loyalty elsewhere. We recently sat down with Hoodoo Digital’s (now Rightpoint) Associate Design Director, Hannah Stout, to dive into the importance of great design and what goes into a successful user experience.
Hannah, who has worked in the design field for over a decade, shared that user experience isn’t a concept unique to websites or digital interactions. An easy example of this is eating at a restaurant. When a customer walks into a restaurant, are they approached by an employee? Do they know that the menu is on a QR code at the table? Does the QR code take them directly to the menu, or do they have to click through to one? Is paying for their meal clear and easy? All of these touch points determine whether the customers have a negative or positive experience with the restaurant, often determining if they would come back or recommend the place to their friends.
So, how does this help us better understand UX design? Like a customer having an enjoyable experience at a restaurant, we want users to have an enjoyable experience navigating our sites. Good UX design is about making the user’s journey as seamless as possible, making it easy to comprehend and navigate the site. These characteristics span a broad spectrum of features, like ensuring the site loads quickly, making it easy to locate the information they are looking for, or streamlining the steps to purchase a product. In other words, can they find what they are looking for, and can they complete their desired task in a painless, positive manner.
- Strategy: This is where the design team digs deep and strives to thoroughly understand the business and their goals. They might hold stakeholder interviews, review competition, perform user research, and audit the existing site content to get a firm grip on the company’s intentions and goals. If a site already exists, they may also review analytics to determine what is currently working well on the site and what is not. This research lays the foundation for the next level, Scope.
- Scope: This element includes understanding a site’s requirements technically and functionally, working to define what kind of content they will be working with. The team will identify the specific features and content that are expected to be incorporated into the site. They will pinpoint characteristics in the site functionality like bill paying, appointment scheduling, contact forms, etc. Beyond this, they will begin to solidify the kind of content that will be offered on the site, assessing whether or not it includes things like audio and video assets, metadata, copy, etc.
- Structure: The two steps before Structure set the parameters for features and content the site requires, leading to the next step, structuring out the site. This phase is generally split into two parts: Interaction Design and Information Architecture (IA). Interaction Design is all about refining how the user will interact with the functional requirements established during the Scoping process, including how the system then responds to the user. Information Architecture includes building a sitemap and depicting user flows, determining the arrangements of components and how they are structured on a site. This step includes a lot of organization, mapping, and coming up with templates.
- Skeleton: The second to last element in the design approach is building the layout of the website, aka the “skeleton.” The team uses all the information they have gathered thus far to create a wireframe of the site. Separate functions are pieced together to build an operating site. This includes interface, navigation, and information design. These are the fundamental bones of the website, and now it is ready for the surface skin to be added in the final step of the UX design process.
- Surface: This final phase is the “look and feel” of the site, the final skin. Iconography, imagery, branding, and color are all examples of features included in this final step. This final step is concrete and is a summation of all the previous elements.
At this point, a complete design system has been delivered, and the site is user ready. While a lot of companies approach a site redesign with the idea that it simply needs a “new look and feel,” this approach can be limiting and hinder the return on your investment in a new website. A UX Designer, like Hannah, is trained to go through a company’s current strategy and structure, find the holes, fix them, and optimize design choices to lead to positive and clear user experiences. If you have more questions about UX design or need support in initiating a
UX evaluation, please contact us. We’d be happy to help.
