What is UX Design
UX design connects the products and services we use every day, such as the usability of a website and a mobile app. UX is the make-or-break of any business!
In this article, we’ll look at the most important aspect of UX design, starting with the basics, the value it brings, and its importance for WordPress sites and SaaS products. So, let’s get started!
What is UX design?
UX design involves the elements that shape a user’s experience with a product or service. It considers how these elements make the user feel and how seamless it is to accomplish a task.
This can mean anything from how a user feels when browsing a website to how easy it is to check out when purchasing something online. UX design aims to create an easy, relevant, efficient, and overall pleasant experience for every user.
UX designers must conduct market research, product development, and strategy to create a seamless user experience for every product and service. They build a bridge to customers, helping companies understand them and fulfill their needs and expectations.
UX and UI design – what’s the difference?
You might have seen the “UI/UX designer” job title and think these terms are interchangeable. However, even though they overlap, UX and UI are entirely different.
“User Experience Design” is sometimes used interchangeably with terms like “User Interface Design” and “Usability.” However, even though usability and user interface (UI) design are a big part of UX design, they are subsets.
UX designers must consider the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product. This includes aspects of branding, usability, design, and function. The process starts even before the product arrives in the user’s hands.
On the other hand, UI refers to the product’s actual interface. This includes the visual design of the screen that users navigate through or the buttons they click when browsing a site. UI design covers a website interface’s visual and interactive elements, from the color palettes and typography to the animations and touch points (like buttons and scrollbars).
Products that offer great user experience (such as Apple products) are designed with their user in mind and with the whole process of acquiring and even troubleshooting. UX designers focus not only on creating usable products but also on other aspects, including efficiency, pleasure, and fun. Therefore, there is no concrete definition of a good user experience, but designers always aim to deliver a good user experience that meets a specific user’s needs when using a product.
Principles of UX Design
Now that you know more about the basics of UX design and how it differs from UI design, it is important to discover some universal principles to follow. Here are the 3 most crucial user experience design principles UX designers should know.
Focus on the user
The first UX design principle, user-centricity, is one of the most important. The goal is to create products that solve users’ problems, so UX designers should dedicate their work to this principle.
Focusing on the user means prioritizing their needs and making decisions based on everything you know about them and what they want from your product. User-centricity is part of the UX designing process, which starts with user research to find the problem you must solve and to understand your target users.
It’s important to focus on the users and do what’s best for them while balancing the needs of your business.
Consistency
Following the UX design principle of consistency is essential as it will help create products that solve specific user problems.
In UX design, consistency has several layers. The first is keeping your designs consistent in terms of how they look and function across the entire site or app. At the same time, consistency also means meeting the user’s expectations for the product you’re designing.
For example, if you’re designing a SaaS website, your users will come with specific expectations on how the app should function based on their experience with other similar apps. We’re not suggesting copy-pasting what your competitors are doing, but you also don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Being consistent will help create a product that’s easy to use and has a low learning curve for users, which are the key elements of a seamless user experience.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy is a crucial UX principle that shapes how the user will navigate a product and how complicated the process is.
It relates to the information architecture and the visual hierarchy of every page and screen. So what’s the difference?
Information architecture consists of the sitemap, which is the overall structure of your site or app and how the user navigates from one page to another. For example, when navigating through a website homepage, you’ll find different items at the top. When clicking on each item, you’ll be taken to another page or find more options in the form of a drop-down menu. This is an example of a site’s website information architecture.
Visual hierarchy considers how every element is laid out on the screen. The more important elements can be highlighted by placing them at the top of the page and by using bolder colors or bigger fonts to help them stand out.
Essential UX designer tools
Once UX designers understand the core principles of UX design, they must choose the right tools to bring their designs to life. With the right resources, their work may improve, leaving both designers and clients satisfied.
Therefore, we’ve listed two of our favorite UX tools, which helped us create seamless designs and make work more enjoyable.
Adobe XD
XD is Adobe’s flagship UX tool, which has gone through massive evolution throughout the years. Today, it offers a collaboration feature that allows designers to share documents and work collaboratively.
Adobe XD is a solid prototyping tool with features for creating elements and then generating animated transitions with those elements. However, one of the biggest drawbacks is that two or more designers can’t work simultaneously on the same document.
Figma
Figma is a prototyping tool that allows UX designers to co-edit live with other designers. It supports prototyping, vector networks, and design systems management. Figma also has a nice interface that lets designers insert elements, animations, and code to create high-fidelity prototypes.
Figma is an excellent tool for enhancing teamwork and productivity. It offers solid prototyping capabilities that help deliver a close simulation of the end result. However, advanced features may take some time to practice.
UX design for WordPress Sites
WordPress sites are usually easy to set up due to various tools, such as site editors and plugins, themes, and analytics. However, in addition to knowing the essential tools, you also need to apply the best UX practices to ensure visitors have a pleasant experience when browsing your site.
To make sure your visitors have a meaningful, enjoyable and relevant experience from the moment they land on your WordPress site, these are the main ways you should follow:
Know your audience
Plan your WordPress site’s UX design with specific visitors in mind. Assess actual user behavior to judge your site page’s performance and determine what your audience is trying to achieve.
Responsive design
Ensure your site offers a consistent browsing experience across every device. Your site content should be adjusted to fit the screen size your users will view, which means optimizing your site’s layouts on desktop and mobile.
Content design
The UX part of content design ensures that the content across the site is consistent and fits properly with the larger designs. This will involve planning content based on your layouts, buttons, and banners.
UX design for SaaS Products
Software-as-a-service or SaaS is a delivery software model that allows users to access applications without installing physical media. UX design for SaaS can help users have a flawless, intuitive experience when using the software to accomplish their goals seamlessly. Here are some tips for elevating the UX of your next SaaS projects.
Conduct UX research and testing
User research and testing help you discover what your users need, how they can use your product, and what they think about it. You can start this by asking questions like “What do users want?” And “How could we improve the experience with interaction or feature?”
Prioritize simplicity
Remember that your users are usually busy and in a hurry, so they don’t want to spend too much time figuring out how to use your product. Therefore, it’s important to avoid unnecessary features and provide clear instructions with familiar designs and patterns they’re comfortable with.
Create a short and sweet registration process
Your product registration process is a make-or-break for your acquisition efforts. Users are usually pressed for time and have limited patience, so a complicated and lengthy registration process can be an instant turn-off. This is why keeping the registration process short and simple is important.
Wrapping up
When building a digital product or showcasing a service, getting talented user interface and user experience designers to work on a product from scratch is important.
No matter the service or product you’re building, your users will use them eventually, and designers must keep that notion in mind.
UX design entirely focuses on the experience. A business must build a positive product by designing a pleasant customer experience. Your end-user must be your first user, and you can do this by testing, hypothesizing, and building customer-conscious products from the start.
Need help improving your SaaS site or product? Get in touch! We can help.
Over 10 years of experience in SaaS UX design, built 150 projects, owns two SaaS businesses in the iGaming space, and is passionate about tennis & books.
