Introduction
You’re in a meeting, and someone says they need to improve the user experience on their website. You have no idea what they’re talking about. They ask you: “What is UX?” Then you have to explain it again, and you can never find the right words (or at least not in a concise way). If this sounds familiar, don’t worry—it happens to all of us! We’re here to help with these top 10 questions we get asked about website UX design:
“What is a user journey?”
A user journey is the path a user takes to complete a task. It’s a visual representation of how users interact with your website, from their first click to their last.
A user journey can look like many things—it might be as simple as a line connecting all the pages where you clicked on “Buy Now!” or it could include screenshots of each step along the way. Either way, it gives us insight into how people are using our site and what we can improve based on those actions.
“What are the important parts of user research?”
User research is one of the most important parts of UX design. It helps you understand your users, their goals, needs and tasks.
User research can be done in a variety of ways:
- User interviews – talking to people about their needs and goals
- Card sorting – organizing content into groups based on how users would classify it. Users choose where they think items belong on a screen if they were able to move them around freely. This helps us test whether our categories make sense to users (and sometimes we’ll find out that they don’t).
- Cognitive walkthroughs – thinking through every step involved with completing a task or goal for someone who has no experience with your product/service/initiative (like new parents or students). You might have an idea about what someone’s journey will look like before they use your app but really understanding it comes from using the app yourself as if you were learning about it for the first time!
“How do I get started with UX design?”
If you’re interested in learning more about the world of UX, here are some great resources:
- You can start by learning what UX design is.
- There are many awesome blogs and forums for designers to hone their skills.
- You can also check out books written by the pros!
“What does a good design review process look like?”
You might be thinking, “Well, isn’t that obvious? You ask your users what they want, then give them what they want!” But user research isn’t always that simple. In fact, if you try to build a website or app with only one round of user research (i.e., one survey or focus group), it’s likely that your product will miss the mark when it comes to meeting people’s needs and expectations. For this reason and many others (including scope creep), design reviews are an iterative process: They involve multiple rounds of feedback from different stakeholders on different aspects of the product until everyone involved agrees on what should be built next.
“How do we get sign-off from stakeholders?”
The next step in the process is to get sign-off from stakeholders. But who are they?
Stakeholders are people who are affected by your website, and ideally they should be involved in the design process. When you’re deciding how much time to spend with a specific stakeholder, think about what he or she can bring to the table. For example, if you’re thinking about making some changes to your product pages, have an engineer review them before moving forward because he’ll know whether or not it’s possible from a technical standpoint. If you’re redesigning your homepage, ask someone from marketing for feedback because she’ll know if there’s any copy that doesn’t make sense or could be improved upon.
“How long does it take to make changes to a website?”
This is a tricky one because there are so many variables involved, starting with the scope of your project. If you’re redesigning your website and want an entirely new experience for users, that can take much longer than making minor tweaks to existing pages.
A project’s complexity also comes into play—for example, if it involves a lot of custom coding. We recently worked on a site where we had to build a full payment system from scratch in order to provide our client with an intuitive shopping experience that met their needs exactly. That took us months (and lots of caffeine).
The size of the team is another factor: larger websites require more people working on them at once and 24/7 availability can make things difficult when it comes to scheduling updates or releases. Smaller teams will always be able to move faster than large ones, but even so it’s still important for us all know what each other is doing so we don’t get confused about who’s working on what part of the project at any given time!
“How can we improve the customer experience on our site?”
A website is only one part of the overall customer experience. It’s not just about how your site looks, but also about how users interact with it, how they find what they need on it and then use that information to make decisions.
For example: if a customer wants to buy a new pair of shoes online but ends up buying some earrings instead because he or she couldn’t find any shoes anywhere on the site, then you might have an issue with your user experience design. You should be looking at all aspects of the journey from awareness to purchase so that you can improve it in many places!
“What’s the difference between UX and UI?”
So, what’s the difference between UX and UI?
- UX – User Experience. It’s about the experience of using a product. How does it feel to interact with your website or app? In other words, how is your user feeling when they’re using it.
- UI – User Interface. It’s about the look and feel of a website or app. How does it look? What colors do you use? Is there an aesthetic consistency throughout their site or app that makes sense for their customers/users?
“What’s it like working with you, as a client?”
One of the biggest questions we get from people who are considering working with us is, “What’s it like working with you?”
Here’s how it works: we learn about your business, your customers and competitors. Then we create a plan to meet your goals and manage your budget. The whole process takes about six months, but after that point you can rest easy knowing that everything will go according to plan.
“What do you charge for your services?”
We get this question a lot. To answer it, we’d like to point out that our services are tailored to the individual client and will vary depending on the project in question.
Let’s take an example of a web design project. The price of this will be dictated by the particular industry you operate in, your projected audience size, and how much time we spend working together on each stage of development. Do you have an established brand with existing branding guidelines? Or do you need us to create one for you? Either way, expect your budget for a website redesign or build from scratch to be higher than if all we were doing was creating new content for an existing site – but only if those things are particularly well-established or specific!
If your business is still in its infancy or just starting out, then consider hiring us as consultants first before committing too heavily financially into something concretely defined yet still lacking direction (that is: when any changes could potentially require redoing more than 50% of what’s already been done). This will allow us both more flexibility while avoiding unnecessary costs down the line – especially since every minute spent discussing large-scale decisions like color palettes counts double toward our hourly rate!
We’re always happy to answer questions about what we do.
We love answering questions about what we do. We’re always happy to answer questions about what we do, and in fact, it’s why we exist. That’s our job: We’re here to help people with their questions about what we do and how they can use us to answer them. There’s no way around it—the two go hand in hand!
Any question you have is important and deserves an immediate response from us at [your company] so please feel free to email me directly at [email address]. I’ll be sure that your question is answered quickly by one of our experienced customer service representatives who will be able or willing (depending on the nature of your inquiry)
Conclusion
We love discussing UX, so if you have any other questions that weren’t covered here, feel free to send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you!