UX Design

UX design (user experience design) is the discipline of shaping a digital product so it is useful, easy to use and pleasant, from the first visit to the goal reached. It relies on user research, testing and iteration rather than intuition alone, and it comes before the visual work of UI design.

A bigger idea than a screen

The ISO 9241-210 standard defines user experience as the perceptions and responses of a person that result from the use, or anticipated use, of a product, system or service. The phrase is often credited to Don Norman, who is said to have popularized it in the 1990s while at Apple. The wording matters: experience starts before the site opens (the ad, the Google search) and continues after (the confirmation email, the support chat).

So UX design covers the structure of a site, the wording on buttons, the way a form handles an error and the loading speed, not just how things look.

What a UX designer actually does

The title hides several jobs, and on small teams one person does them all:

• User research: interviews, observation, surveys, and a close read of existing usage data.
• Information architecture: deciding how content is grouped, labeled and reached.
• Interaction design: defining how each step of a task works, including what happens when something goes wrong.
• Prototyping and testing: turning ideas into something people can click, then watching them use it.

UX and UI: who decides what

UX answers “what should the person be able to do, and in what order?”. UI design answers “what do the screens that make it possible look like?”. The two work side by side but not in random order: a beautiful screen on top of a badly planned journey is still a bad product.

Research methods

You do not need every method on every project. A few cover most situations:

• User interviews reveal goals, vocabulary and frustrations that analytics cannot show.
• Usability tests put a real task in front of real people while you watch where they hesitate.
• Surveys measure how widespread a problem is once interviews have named it.
• Analytics and session recordings show where people drop off, and point to the pages worth testing.
• Heuristic reviews check an interface against established usability principles, quickly and without recruiting anyone.

What a UX project produces

• personas and user journey maps;
• a site map and navigation diagrams;
• wireframes, then clickable prototypes;
• test reports with recommendations ranked by priority;
• a UX audit of an existing site or app.

Principles you will meet everywhere

Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics, published in the 1990s, remain the most widely used review grid. Four of them are enough for a first diagnosis:

• Visibility of system status. The visitor knows what is happening: loading, message sent.
• Match with the real world. Labels people understand, not the internal team’s jargon.
• Error prevention. A field that guides beats a message that scolds.
• User control and freedom. People can go back, undo and correct without starting over.

Web accessibility belongs on the same list: an experience that shuts out part of the audience is not a good experience.

How to measure experience

Good UX shows up in numbers. Teams usually track task success rate (does the person get there?), time on task, error count, and self-reported satisfaction, for example with the System Usability Scale (SUS), a standard ten-question survey. In analytics, heavy drop-off on a form, repeated clicks on the same spot, or the same questions reaching support again and again all point to a spot in the journey that is stuck.

UX and SEO: the same visitors

The two disciplines overlap more than people think. A clear site structure helps visitors find their way and helps search engines understand the site. A short loading time and a page that reads well on mobile keep visitors around, and speed is among the factors Google says it takes into account. Content that really answers the question asked avoids the immediate bounce back to the results page. Working on UX and SEO together means not pitting them against each other.

Frequent mistakes

• Testing too late, when there is no room left to fix anything.
• Replacing users with the team. Colleagues know the product and do not hit the same blockers.
• Mistaking preferences for needs: the loudest opinion in the room is not data.
• Forgetting mobile, where most visits often happen.
• Shipping without planning any measurement after launch, and so never knowing whether the new version works better.

UX on a marketing website

UX is not only for apps. A brochure site has tasks too: find an offer, understand what makes it different, get in touch. Each extra click, each overlong form and each page that is hard to read on mobile costs inquiries. For a company planning a redesign, a UX/UI audit beforehand shows what to keep, what to fix and what to rebuild. We explain why in our article Why a Figma UX/UI audit before a Webflow redesign changes everything.

At Mazette.co, user research, prototyping and testing are handled under UX/UI and Product design, whether the project is a website or a SaaS product.