Synonyms: customer experience, CX, UX, User Driven
From a definition standpoint, and at the most simple level, user experience (UX) refers to how a person (i.e. user) feels about using a product, platform or system. For our purposes, the product or system is a website, portal or app.
Why do we care about user experience?
While websites are important to every day business, we aren’t building websites for ourselves. UX is important because it allows us to take off our business hat and put on the hat of our users, gaining a deep understanding of our target users, what they need, what they value and what causes friction in their journey. Having this deep understanding and leveraging UX best practices will help you improve the quality of interaction and deliver a positive experience (that hopefully leads to conversion).
How do I introduce UX principles into my website redesign project?
We typically attach a UX designer to projects to advocate for the end user and guide the work to focus on user needs, their flow through a site and how to marry business needs with consumer needs. If you are tackling a project internally, you will want to make sure that you are developing personas and customer journeys early on in your process to document and get agreement on what users need so that information can be carried through the rest of your project.
If you want to chat more about user experience best practices or how to incorporate UX principles into your project, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.
Stay thirsty, friends!
