Hi, this is Mary with TinyFrog Technologies and today we’re talking with Brian about creating an effective website & common web design UX mistakes. How do you define user experience on a website?
User Experience vs. User Interface
That’s a good question. A lot of people confuse user experience with user interface – UX and UI – because they’re so similar, apparently, but really UX is more of an umbrella term that encompasses user interface and some other elements.
The user experience is the overall feeling that the visitor is gonna get as they’re using that website versus a user interface is the actual what am I clicking on, what forms am I filling out.
The experience is more about are the images valuable to me? Are they creating the right emotional feeling for me? Is the text readable? Are they selling me the benefits? It’s the overall experience rather than just the actual interface piece of it.
Common Website UX Mistakes
What are common mistakes you see with website user experience?
A common mistakes is that the site owner’s focus tends to be a little bit inward and not so much recognizing what it is that the visitor is looking for.
I think a bigger mistake I see than that is that we spend as visitors 99.99% of our time on other people’s websites. When I come to your website, if you’ve done something drastically different because I’ve created habits per item, especially if it’s an e-commerce website, and I’m kind of used to a normal way of researching a product and buying products.
If you’ve done something that’s significantly different, you’re forcing me to relearn what your system is all about and as a web visitor, that’s something I don’t usually like to do. I like to be able to just rely on my habits and get in and out as quickly as possible – that’s researching the product or actually buying the product.
Sometimes we’ll hear clients say, “I really want my site to be different.” Our the question then is, “Well, OK, let’s talk about why.” And maybe what the client is talking about is making your branding & messaging different, but you don’t necessarily want the interface to be different because your visitors, when they get to the site, they’re not going to be sure why this is different and what it all means.
