Well depending on who you are speaking to User Experience or UX, UXD, UED or XD all mean the same exact thing. So don’t be fooled when you are talking to different marketing or digital agencies when some of this terminology is thrown at you unexpectedly.
All of these abbreviations come down to one key point. Enhancing the experience of your website so that it is easy to navigate to creating a pleasant buying experience for the user. Specialists in UX span from digital marketers to developers, to content writers.
You also may hear the abbreviation UI, which stands for User Interface Design. UI compliments UX by offering an excellent presentation of the product and interactivity. Specialists in UI are graphic designers and can sometimes be developers as well if they are on a small team.
Why is UX important for online businesses?
Unlike the old days, where nearly every store was brick and mortar, you could easily walk and touch a product to gain trust from a retailer; now many retailers are online.
You only have a few quick seconds to catch a person’s attention before they click the dreaded back button and go back to the search results. In those first glances, you either gain a customer or lose one to your competitors.
Think about it this way. Once you close this post, search for something in your preferred browser and click randomly on a result that appears. Set a timer in your head for 5 seconds to scroll the page.
After those 5 seconds, what do you remember? What was the call to action? Did you see what you were looking for immediately? Were you confused by anything? Did the website leave you questioning your decision to purchase a product or service from them possibly? Did the website even load after 5 seconds? The questions you could ask yourself can go on and on forever.
But let me ask you this – would you consider your 5-second experience to be a positive one or negative? Now go to your website and do the same thing. 5-seconds; positive experience or negative?
Do this a few more times and compare this to how your website looks, feels and functions. Do you see opportunities for yourself?
Remember, User Experience is all in the way that your users experience your website, not just how you experience it.
