Your website’s gorgeous homepage might catch a visitor’s attention, but it won’t keep them there unless they find what they need. According to Toptal, 88% of online consumers never return to a website where they had a bad experience during their visit.

Even if you run an art gallery and want to include hundreds of pictures on your landing page, visitors will lose interest fast if your site isn’t smooth. That’s why user experience is non-negotiable for your business website.

In this article, we’ll cover the importance of UX in web design. We’ll also talk about UX vs UI in general, and why you shouldn’t just spend thousands on stunning visuals and call it a day, but focus on UX too.

Read on to learn more about how you can ensure a good experience for your website’s visitors.

UX vs UI: Understanding the Main Difference

First, let’s cover the main difference between UX and UI. UX focuses on how users feel and interact with a product overall, while UI refers to the visual design elements like buttons, menus, and layouts that users directly interact with.

Think of it this way: UI is your website’s outfit that catches someone’s eye from across the room, and UX is your personality.

Sure, you could just stop here and say UI makes things pretty and UX makes them work. Simple enough, right? But if you’re serious about converting those curious visitors into “take my money” customers, you need to dig deeper into this relationship.

This is your first step toward building a meaningful web presence for your customers. So, let’s break down the UI and UX below.

The Role of Interface Design (UI): The Visuals

User Interface, commonly called UI or interface design, covers everything you see on a website. UI can be any of the following: your buttons, text, images, sliders, and the colours and fonts that make everything look cohesive.

But imagine a restaurant website with drop-dead gorgeous typography and food photography. That’s UI flexing. The menu looks incredible, but can hungry customers find what they’re craving? That’s where things get interesting. We’ll explain why shortly.

Understanding UX Design: The User’s Journey

User Experience design, or UxD, means designing websites and apps that don’t make your customers want to throw their devices out the window. It ensures people can use your website smoothly and accomplish their goals without pulling their hair out.

That’s not all, though. Someone might fall head over heels for your site’s gorgeous looks, but if they can’t buy that product or track down your contact info, they’re bouncing faster than a bad check. And trust us, nobody wants visitors leaving with a bad taste in their mouth.

The User-Facing Flaws of Poor Graphic Design

Nobody likes an ugly website. We get it. However, if you prioritise looks over how things work, you’ll cause serious problems for your website that become much harder to fix later on.

Even more so, you may not realise it from your beauty-first perspective, but your users suffer from the resulting confusion if visual flair is all you care about for your website.

We’ll explain the UI over UX conundrum further below. Keep reading.

When Visuals Directly Obstruct Functionality

Most website owners don’t realise that large images slow down their site and cause major UX problems. It’s the same story with complex animations and flashy transitions. They might look impressive, but they’re secretly stealing precious seconds from your loading times while visitors tap their fingers impatiently.

With every extra second of loading time, you lose 20% of potential customers (as per Google).

Want to know more? Cool. Your users expect pages to load within three seconds (that’s barely enough to blink twice!), or 53% are gone instantly. And beautiful graphics take longer to load, so those large files are more of a barrier than anything else.

Importance of UX in Web Design: Common Usability Problems

The usability principles are a set of guidelines to ensure your system or product is easier to use. If you ignore them during your visual selection process, you’ll create specific on-page issues on your website.

So let’s go through some of those frustrating issues that your visitors will probably encounter.

• Poor Readability: You may find stylised fonts and modern colour schemes attractive. But most of the time, people can’t read your content and end up leaving your site fast. We worked with clients recently who chose grey text on white backgrounds because it looked minimalistic. Visitors couldn’t read anything, and the site went down in the rankings.
• Confusing Navigation: Creative menu designs may hide important pages from direct view. And when someone can’t find your services page because you’ve buried it in a fancy dropdown, your creativity has backfired completely.
• Mobile Incompatibility: Half of your confirmed customers leave your site instantly if it doesn’t work well on mobile phones. You can be a fan of complex layouts that look perfect on the desktop, but they usually break completely on phones.
• Distracting Elements: Accessibility issues like auto-playing videos will draw your users’ attention away from important elements. And those beautiful animations often hide your calls-to-action and primary content from users trying to complete tasks.

This is the tale of how a thousand beautiful websites send their visitors running back to Google.

Good Information Architecture Boosts Usability

Information architecture (IA) is the structural solution to your site’s navigational chaos. Think of IA as the blueprint for your digital house. Would you build a home without knowing where the kitchen and bathroom go? You shouldn’t build a website either without planning where each piece of content belongs.

IA involves organising content logically to match how people naturally think and search. If you do it properly, your users will find precisely what they need exactly where they expect it to be.

That’s why you need IA principles. Otherwise, your website becomes all flash and no substance. We’re walking through those principles in this section.

The Core Principles of Effective IA

A strong information architecture uses practical arrangement and clear labels, so structure your content around how users think rather than your company’s structure.

Over the years, we’ve found that users arrange information differently from business owners. For example, as a company person, you might organise services by department, but visitors think in terms of problems they need solved.

An effective IA plan closes this gap by putting user logic first. You should utilise a good plan too unless you enjoy watching users get lost on your website.

How IA Provides a Framework for UI Designers

Consider a clear and well-planned information architecture as the skeleton of your website. UI designers then dress the skeleton up with visuals (content, images, etc.). And IA dictates what content must exist on each page and how those pages should connect to each other.

When designers have a strong foundation in IA, they create beautiful as well as functional sites. You don’t have to compromise anything with those sites. But if they have no idea about IA or choose to ignore it completely, even stunning designs become confusing.

The Business Cost of Bad UX for Online Businesses

Poor user experience costs you real money (way more than just losing a single sale). This ripple effect hits your whole business and creates ongoing money problems that can seriously slow your growth.

Bad UX approaches make your business lose money in the following ways:

• Wasted Marketing Spend: Beautiful ads become worthless when they lead to broken user experiences. Say, you just spent $500 to drive visitors to your homepage through Google Ads, but if they can’t find your contact form, that money goes to waste.
• Increased Operational Load: We’ve worked with e-commerce clients who hired extra customer service staff just to handle “Where’s my account login?” calls. When your websites have such confusing elements, they generate floods of preventable support tickets. That means you have to pay more for these support calls.
• Diminished Brand Equity: Most frustrated users will ensure others see why they didn’t take your service. A legal firm we know lost three potential clients in one week because visitors couldn’t find their practice areas page. Those people told others about their poor experience.
• Bad SEO Performance: High bounce rates from poor UX directly hurt your visibility in search results. It happens because when people bounce off your site within seconds, Google notices it and drops your rankings as a consequence. The process of gaining future traffic becomes even harder for you.

When you think deeply, it’s (almost) impressive how efficiently a bad website can turn your paying customers into expensive enemies.

Using a User-First Design Thinking Process

Look, after gathering knowledge about bad UX and its impact, you’re probably wondering how you can avoid these situations. Well, for a start, you can change your thinking process and focus on a user-first design approach.

Design thinking gives you a way to solve problems by putting your users first in every decision. This process ensures you build what people need rather than what looks impressive in boardroom presentations.

Based on our observations working with 500 projects, companies that follow this process spend less time fixing problems and more time growing their business. All because they understand the necessity of the user-first thinking process.

The User-First Design Approach: A 5-Step Process

Designers follow a five-step process for their user-first design approach. The steps include empathising, defining, ideation, prototyping, and testing. We’re breaking them down below for you.

Stage 1: Empathise

In the first stage, you should talk to real customers and watch how they interact with your design or solve problems. The experience may be different from what you think.

Last year, we saw that a restaurant client’s assumptions were completely wrong. The client had thought visitors wanted elaborate menus with photos, but they just wanted opening hours and quick reservations.

Stage 2: Define

Use information from your research to create a clear problem statement that focuses on user needs instead of business assumptions. This statement becomes your project’s north star, to say the least.

Stage 3: Ideate

In this step, you need to brainstorm multiple solutions to your found problems without limiting creativity. Generate as many ideas as possible before you get down to judging any of them.

Stage 4: Prototype

Create simple, low-cost versions of your best ideas. User experience designers often use paper sketches or basic wireframes before writing any code.

Though most designers use Figma or Adobe Xd for this process, you can also use a dedicated wireframing software Balsamiq, to create your digital wireframes.

Stage 5: Test

Put your prototypes in front of actual users and gather feedback. If you test early, you’ll find out which ideas work and which ideas sound good but fail in practice.

This user-first approach saves thousands in development costs by catching problems before they become expensive mistakes.

Adding Business Value with Interaction Design

Interaction design (IxD) focuses on the specific, moment-to-moment feedback users receive when they interact with elements on your site. Think about what happens when someone clicks a button, fills out a form, or hovers over a link.

When interactions on your website feel clunky or unpredictable, users doubt the reliability of your business. But if your site works well, people feel confident completing purchases and sharing their contact details.

Curious to know how you can use a good interaction design to attract customers to your website? Here you go.

Building User Confidence Through Feedback

If someone submits a contact form, they need to know it worked. So give users immediate, clear feedback, and you’ll remove their uncertainty and anxiety. A simple “Thanks! We’ll get back to you within 24 hours” message prevents them from wondering if their inquiry disappeared into the void.

In our experience, when users don’t receive confirmation, they submit forms multiple times. The lack of feedback frustrates users so much, and the duplicate entries quickly become tiresome to deal with for your business.

How Small Interactions Signal Professionalism

The quality of micro-interactions on your website demonstrates your company’s attention to detail. Those interactions show that you’re willing to provide the best experience possible for your visitors.

For instance, distinct button states that change colour when clicked, helpful error messages that explain exactly what went wrong, and obvious loading indicators all signal that you care about user experience.

These tiny details separate professional businesses from amateur ones.

Building Brand Reputation with Website User Experience

Perhaps the biggest benefit of good UX is that it builds customer loyalty. That’s because if users feel like you respect their time and honestly consider their needs, they become advocates for your brand.

We’ve watched businesses improve their reputations simply by fixing their websites. One accounting firm we worked with saw their referral rate double after we redesigned their client portal. People started talking about how “easy” and “professional” the firm was to work with. It was nothing short of remarkable.

So, the takeaway is that your website is the first real interaction someone has with your business. Always make it count.

Time to Put Users First

Sure, visuals make your website look cool, but you can’t ignore functionality. Don’t get so caught up making things look pretty that you forget about user experience. You’ll lose both your visitors and your money.

In this article, we’ve talked about UX vs. UI, the importance of UX in web design, IA in UX design, and the five steps of the user-first design process. You should now understand that beautiful design might catch your visitors’ eyes, but the usability of your website ensures conversions.

If you’re ready to improve your brochure-looking website and make it a money-earning machine, we at Emaglink Web Design can help you. Contact us today for an expert evaluation of your current site and find out how proper UX can take it to the highest level.