What is UX and how you can use it

The term UX stands for User Experience. It’s all about designing, measuring and defining your website or online presence, based around a good user experience. Essentially UX means designing something that’s useful, easy to use and a joy to interact with. The aim is to make the user’s experience profitable for you, while engaging and enlightening your visitors.

Ask ten UK experts for their definition of UX and you’ll almost certainly get ten answers. They’d all be skirting around the same basic ideas, but with each expert having a slightly different interpretation. But the core concept is always the same – to make your online presence usable, as well as being a friendly experience for your site visitors.

Here at Brookstone we like to break UX up into 7 core values:

• Online information needs to be credible
• It needs to be findable
• It needs to be accessible
• The content needs to be valuable
• The platform on which the experience is provided needs to be usable
• It needs to be desirable graphically, to encourage visitors to engage with the information
• It needs to be a source of useful information

Strip the idea of UX down to basics and it’s just the same as what a shopkeeper does in a bricks and mortar shop. He or she will be studying the way that their customers engage with their products, assessing their journey through the store, so that they can position their products to the best effect. Shopkeepers keep a constant watch for how easily customers can get around their shop, assessing the impact of different products and signage.

The colour of the walls, the lighting, the colour of the floor, the shop fittings and furniture and the physical displays all add up to creating an ambience in a physical shop. And the shopkeeper is constantly looking to make improvements – after all, it needs to offer prospective customers the best possible experience if it’s to encourage sales and maximise profits. And this is where UX comes in – it’s exactly the same concept, only tailored for online visitors.

So where do you begin with UX? Well, it’s something that’s been around for a number of years now. And online websites have been around for even longer, so there’s plenty of information available. Historical data means it’s much easier these days to find out what’s working for other people, and what isn’t.

If you’re designing a brand new website or digital marketing initiative, then you’ll design with UX in mind from the outset. You’ll be in the highly desirable position of being able to look back over the facts and figures. A wealth of information, including market research data, means you’ll have the best possible chance of designing a really friendly, useful and profitable website.

The colours on the walls, the colour of the carpets, the shop fittings and furniture and the physical displays all add up to creating an ambience in a physical shop. And the shopkeeper is constantly looking to make improvements – after all, it needs to offer prospective customers the best possible experience if it’s to encourage sales and maximise profits. And this is where UX comes in – it’s exactly the same concept, only tailored for online visitors.

So where do you begin with UX? Well, it’s something that’s been around for a number of years now. And online websites have been around for even longer, so there’s plenty of information available. Historical data means it’s much easier these days to find out what’s working for other people, and what isn’t.

If you’re designing a brand new website or digital marketing initiative, then you’ll design with UX in mind from the outset. You’ll be in the highly desirable position of being able to look back over the facts and figures. A wealth of information, including market research data, means you’ll have the best possible chance of designing a really friendly, useful and profitable website.

In most cases, however, you’re likely to already have the website or online marketing in place. So a good place to start is by installing some kind of tracking software on your website that will video users going through your online store. You can’t identify who the users are, but you can see how they make their way through the site. You’ll see the cursor clicks, and the way they get from one place on the site to another. You can even build a heat map of your site pages, as well as a flow chart of how visitors travel from page to page, showing which links they click on their journey.

Information like this is absolutely key to UX. You’ll get to see how the visitor arrives at the website and how they travel through it. So you can find out the dead areas of the site, as well as the really popular sections. And this enables you to change the design accordingly – the simplest of changes can often be hugely profitable.