Skip to main content

UX (User Experience)

User Experience (UX) is the experience a visitor has on a website or app.

What does UX mean?

UX stands for User Experience and describes how visiting a digital platform feels, how effective it is in achieving its goals, and how pleasant the overall experience is.

Can the visitor find their way around immediately? Does the page load quickly? Do they know what to do and where to click? Does the website work smoothly on a smartphone? These and other factors are all part of the overall experience.

UX is more than just design. Structure, clarity, speed, and usability are equally important. Good UX is usually invisible—as long as everything runs smoothly, there’s no confusion, frustration, or abandonment.

Where does UX come from?

The term “user experience” was coined in the 1990s by cognitive scientist Don Norman. Commissioned by Apple, he expanded the focus beyond mere user interfaces to a comprehensive understanding of the entire experience. With the emergence of new websites and apps, UX became a discipline in its own right, and its importance grew alongside the increasing competition for attention.

Why is UX important?

Countless providers vie for customers online. If a visitor can’t find their way around a site, they’ll quickly leave. The goal of good UX is to make the path to the final click as simple and pleasant as possible, so that interest turns into action. Good UX can increase the number of inquiries and conversions and builds trust in the digital offering. Search engines also value UX and reward user-friendliness and technical quality with better visibility.

Benefits

  • A good user experience guides visitors directly to their goal, thereby increasing the number of conversions.
  • A pleasant UX design reduces bounce rates and increases time on site.
  • Clear user guidance builds trust in the provider.
  • Good UX has a positive effect on search engine visibility.

Challenges

Whether UX is good or bad usually only becomes apparent through users’ actual behavior. This requires observation, testing, and a willingness to set aside one’s own assumptions. Improvements often demand a seamless interplay of design, technology, and content. Optimization is virtually never fully complete, as expectations and devices are constantly changing. Furthermore, there is often a gap between what companies want to show and what visitors actually need. It’s essential to always make decisions from the user’s perspective.

Example

A provider of complex control technology has an informative but cluttered website. The contact form is hidden. On smartphones, the buttons are too small to use. This causes many visitors to leave before they even get started.

After a structural overhaul of the user experience—including improved contact options and a responsive design for smartphones—the number of inquiries increased significantly, even though the content remained the same. The problem wasn’t the offering itself, but the path to it.

Related terms

Wireframe A wireframe is a simple, conceptual layout of a website that defines the structure and arrangement of elements. Heatmap A heatmap is a map with color gradations that shows how visitors click, scroll, and spend time on a website. Responsive Design Responsive design automatically adapts the website to the visitor’s screen size, whether on a smartphone or a movie screen. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the targeted improvement of a website to generate more inquiries, purchases, or sign-ups while maintaining the same number of visitors.