UX is the hot topic that people are talking about, and designers are serious about today. If you want to be successful and build a good relation with your online visitors, you have to have a good UX. The following post will discuss in detail about UX, and its importance in designing a website.

What is UX?

User Experience (UX) is how a person feels while interacting with a digital product. UX includes a number of factors that are controlled by designers and developers. These factors include performance, utility, design, usability, ergonomics, and overall human interaction.

UX is a part of the design process that you hear about when something goes wrong. Thus, it should be a fundamental part of the design process, right from early concepts to the final product.

Why Should You Care?

User experience certainly gets more attention when it is bad than when it is good. A sign of a great and seamless user interface is that users dont even think about it. They just use it, get what theyarelooking for,and move on. On the other hand, a poor user experience tends to make a user impatient, frustrated, and angry at times. This bad UX is remembered for a long time by the user.

Imagine you are at a restaurant, and you have to wait for too long because they messed up your order. Even worse Think about the time you called a toll-free customer care number to get your issue solved, and you were asked to navigate through the automated system of too many menus to get the information you need. This is what users call bad experiences.

How is UX Important for Websites?

As far as design is concerned, user experience is as important as visual identity. It is not just the appearance of the website that is important. Sometimes, it might happen that a site looks clean, fresh, and sorted, but the user has no clue how to interact with the website. Even this leads to a bad user experience.

UX is even more important for certain types of digital products such as:

• Start-up sites and businesses

• Projects or sites that are expected to last a long time

• Complex websites or applications

• Small-budget projects

• Retail or online sales

Especially for complex sites, UX is the key as users must be able to navigate easily though the site, and understand how to interact with it.

If you neglect UX, then you will end up having a sloppy website that users wont come back to.

As rightly said by Evan Williams (Co-founder, Twitter):

User experience is everything. It always has been, but its undervalued and under-investedin. If you dont know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it.

To drive users back to the site, you need to develop an interaction-rich experience. For any business, an overall experience of the user with products or services offered by the site, could make a difference. It decides whether the user will buy, or come back to buy again or look elsewhere next time.

Lets Talk Numbers:

Here are some of the recent statistics that prove just how critical user experience is for organizations of any size:

• Every $1 invested in UX can have a return of up to $100 for your business. – UXmotel

• 87% of Fortune 500 companies have an easy to find search field on their homepage. – GoGulf

• 57% of users say they wont recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. – Google

• 47% of websites have a clear call-to-action button that takes users 3 seconds or less to see. – GoGlobe

• More than nine out of 10 (95%) agreed with the statement that good user experience just makes sense. – eConsultancy

Have you considered all the points explained above? Does your website have a good UX? If not, then its time you start taking necessary actions to make your website user-friendly.