UX Design: How to improve the user experience of your website

How to improve the user experience?

We have less and less patience on the Internet. There are millions of pages, and many of them do not offer the quality we are looking for. On many occasions, we decide before 3 seconds have passed if we continue browsing a website or if we abandon it and go to the next one that Google recommends. And according to Think with Google , 22% of users close a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, while 35% do so if it takes more than 5 seconds. Thus, companies that do not adapt their pages to the mobile experience lose 40% of conversions.

But not only the loading speed is important, since if we decide to stay longer but find it unpleasant to browse the website, we will also go in search of friendlier sites. To prevent that from happening on our website, we have to take into account our UI UX design agency (or user experience ). The better the UX design we have, the more likely it is that users will stay with us and not get to know the competition.

For this reason, it is essential that all the people involved in the creation of a website have basic notions of UX design. Later we will give you 8 tips to improve the user experience on your website , but first we will see what UX design and UI design are .

UX/UI Design

First of all, let's start by explaining what a UX design is and what a UI design is, since it can lead to confusion. 

What is UX Design?

UX (User Experience) design focuses on improving the user experience . It is design oriented and focused on the user based on the emotions or feelings they have when visiting a website, with the aim of having a pleasant user experience. And to do this, we will need to know what needs and tastes users have, align them with the business or brand objectives, taking into account technological or technical limitations.

What is UI Design?

The UI (User Interface) design is the interface that the user will see when accessing the website. It focuses on adapting the UX design to the brand's corporate identity. It is what allows the user to interact with the web page. If UX focuses on making the page useful and friendly, UI is about making it attractive and visual. However, it is useless to have the most visual page in the world if it does not satisfy the user's needs. For this reason, UX design and UI design must always go hand in hand, hence Interaction Design (IxD) arises.

What is IxD Design?

Interaction Design (IxD) is the union between interface design and user experience. It focuses on creating interfaces focused on user behaviors. Understanding or knowing how users interact with the interface is essential in Interaction Design. With this knowledge you can anticipate or predict how users act with the interface and solve possible errors quickly.

How can we improve the UX design of our website?

Although each website has to look for how to improve its UX by adapting to the characteristics or needs of its users, there are a series of basic tips that, as a general rule, will help you have a good UX design.

Maslow's pyramid

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow developed a theory through his work A Theory of Human Motivation in 1943. In it, he established a hierarchy of human needs with five levels and argued that as humans satisfy more basic needs, we develop needs. and higher desires.

Keeping this pyramid in mind will help you be clear about what you should prioritize when trying to improve the user experience on the web:

Functional : The most basic and important thing about the website, that it works. For example, buying a domain, hiring hosting, etc. The minimum for the site to work. It is something objective and indispensable.

Reliable : No errors, that is, no server crashes, no broken pages, no broken links... In short, you can navigate normally. It is objective and necessary.

Usable : Here it starts to get complicated, and if we have achieved the first two levels, in this one you will have to do everything possible to make the website usable, that is, that it can be navigated "intuitively" and without complications. It is objective and necessary.

Pleasurable : it is about achieving a user experience so good that it generates pleasant emotions in the user. It is subjective and desirable.