What Is The UX Design Of Your Website? With A Step-By-Step Plan!

What Is The UX Design Of Your Website?

UX design stands for User Experience design. UX design is a design process in which the end-user of your website is central. This is important because only a website that offers the user a pleasant experience will enable your company to succeed. Many activities of daily life, from setting your alarm clock to chatting with friends or listening to music may have been made more user-friendly by UX design. In this blog, we tell you what UX design means and how we approach the UX design of your website. What is the UX design?

What is User Experience (UX) Design?

UX design is a relatively new discipline, introduced in 1993 by cognitive scientist Donald Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things. However, it encompasses many other disciplines, because a UX designer must understand psychology, business, market research, design, and technology. What is the UX design

A UX designer designs products that meet the needs of the users. UX design is possible for all products, from coffee machines to apps. However, the term is most commonly used to refer to the design of software, apps, and websites. In this blog, we will focus specifically on the UX design of your website.

For the UX design, it is important that the user experience is investigated, among other things by means of tests. This leads to an improved design. With UX design you can come to a website that:

UX designer as a link

A UX designer should therefore always keep in mind the user flow or user journey, the path the user takes on the website, along with the research, the empathy map, and user stories. The empathy map is a schematic overview of what the user sees, does, feels, and says. The user story briefly shows what the user wants with the website and why.

UX design thus forms the link between technology and people. The UX designer will therefore work closely with developers, end-users, and business stakeholders, such as the clients, from the start of the process. In UX design, the interests of all these stakeholders are weighed up. Read in this blog how we arranged the collaboration between designers and developers at WP Brothers.

Parts UX Design

We can classify four parts under UX Design: User Research (UR), Experience Strategy (ECS), Interaction Design (IDX), and Information Architecture (IA).

User Research

User Research is of course an important part of UX design. If you do not know what is going on in the end-users, UX design is not possible. Researching beforehand, collecting feedback, and testing with real users is indispensable. In the step-by-step plan below you can read how you can proceed.

Experience Strategy

Experience Strategy is a strategy that takes into account the needs of the users as well as those of the company. If you only focus on convenience for the user, you omit the payment in a webshop, so that the user can order free stuff. But your client will not be happy with that.  design is therefore a matter of deliberation between the user and the client in order to arrive at the perfect balance.

Interaction Design

Interaction Design is about the way in which the user interacts with the system, for example with buttons or micro-animations. Important is an intuitive design that allows the user to complete tasks with ease without further explanation. What is the  design?

With Interaction Design, the designer comes closest to UI design (User Interface design). However, it is not the same. UI design is about the outside. In other words, what the design looks like: from visuals to colors and typography. design is about the path that the visitor takes on the website and how it functions. What is the design?

Information Architecture

Information Architecture is all about organizing information in a meaningful and accessible way. This is crucial for the navigation of the website visitor. What is a logical order to present information? And what words do you use to make this clear?

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A step-by-step plan for the UX design of your website

To develop a user-friendly website you need to go through a number of steps. design starts with researching the end-user of your website. This saves you time and leads to a better design. It’s good to have assumptions about whether or not it works, but it’s even better to test those assumptions.

A good starting point for your research is user interviews in which you map out the needs, goals, and behavior of the end-user. It is also important that you highlight pain points and problems in the interviews. The interviews can also clarify in which context your website is or will be used.

Based on the research, you can create user personas and user stories. User personas are semi-fictional characters that represent the end-user. It is important that you do not base these personas on assumptions but on data. With the user stories, you indicate in a few sentences what users will do with your website. 

This is again input for your design and the design gives cause to test again. In this way, your design continues to improve and design is an iterative process. To do this easily, you start with a paper prototype that is easy and cheap to make, which you develop further into a low-fidelity wireframe and later into a high-fidelity wireframe after extensive testing. You keep testing in all phases to see whether the design is actually user-friendly. Read here how we approach testing based on paper prototypes.