25 Oct What Is UX Design? A Small Business Owner’s Plain-English Guide
Part 1 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series in my own words on the UX principles I use in client work.
If customers keep calling you to ask questions your website should have answered, you don’t have a traffic problem. You have a UX problem.
UX stands for user experience. Strip away the jargon and it means something simple: how it feels for a real person to try to get something done with your product — in most of my clients’ cases, your website. Can they find your phone number? Book the appointment? Order the thing? Or do they give up, hit the back button, and call the next business on Google?
I’ve been building websites since 2009, and I recently went back and completed the first course in Google’s UX Design Certificate — Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design, through Coursera. I didn’t do it because I was starting over. I did it to sharpen the fundamentals and put better language around what I already do for clients every week. This series is that language, in plain English, aimed at the people who actually hire me: small business owners, non-profits, and churches here in Eastern North Carolina.
UX is not how your website looks. It’s how it works for someone in a hurry.
A beautiful website can still have terrible UX. So can an ugly one have great UX — although you don’t have to choose, and I don’t think you should.
Here’s the test I use. A customer lands on your site with one job in mind. It’s Saturday, they’re on their phone in a parking lot, and they need the NC Freedom Fest schedule and parking info before the gates get busy. Or it’s slower: a family visiting First Baptist Church for the first time on Sunday, trying to find service times and what to expect for their kids. UX is everything that helps or hurts that person between landing on your page and finishing their job.
When I review a site — mine included — I run four checks.
Check 1: Can they actually use it?
Buttons that are too small to tap. Menus that hide the one page everyone wants. Text that disappears into a busy background photo. Forms that clear everything when you make one mistake.
If using your site takes effort, people won’t make the effort. As a result, they’ll leave. Usability isn’t a nicety — it’s the floor. Everything else is built on top of it.
Check 2: Does it solve their problem?
A visitor didn’t come to admire your website. They came because something in their life needs fixing, booking, buying, or understanding.
Good UX keeps that job front and center. Your services are written the way a customer would search for them, not the way your industry talks about them. Your most important action — call, book, request a quote — is obvious on every page, not buried three clicks deep. If a page doesn’t help a visitor complete their job, I ask what it’s doing there.
Check 3: Can everyone use it?
This is the one that gets skipped, and it’s the one I care about more every year.
Your customers include people using screen readers, people zooming text to 200%, people with shaky hands trying to tap a link, people on slow connections and five-year-old phones. If your site only works for a young designer on a big monitor with fast Wi-Fi, it doesn’t work.
In addition, designing so everyone can get in and get their job done isn’t charity, and it isn’t just compliance. It’s customers. I’ll go deeper on this in a later post in this series, because it deserves more than a paragraph — but it belongs in the foundation, not bolted on at the end.
Check 4: Do they leave feeling good about you?
People remember frustration, and they remember ease. A site that loads fast, reads clearly, and respects their time leaves a feeling: this business has its act together. A site that fights them leaves the opposite feeling — and they attach that feeling to your business, not to your web designer.
In addition, that feeling is part of UX too. It’s why two businesses with the same services and the same prices can get very different results from their websites.
What this means for your website
You don’t need a redesign every time something on that list bothers you. A lot of UX fixes are small: a clearer headline, a phone number where thumbs can reach it, a shorter form, a page that answers the question customers keep asking you in person.
But you do need to look at your site the way a stranger in a hurry sees it. That’s the whole discipline, honestly. The rest of UX — the research, the testing, the design process I’ll cover in the next posts in this series — exists to help you see your own business through your customers’ eyes, before their money walks out the door.
Try this today: hand your phone to someone who’s never seen your website. Ask them to find how to contact you, or how to book, or what you charge to get started. Don’t help them. Just watch, and count the seconds and the wrong taps. That little moment of discomfort is the cheapest UX research you’ll ever do — and it usually pays for itself.
Need a second set of eyes? I build and redesign websites for small businesses, non-profits, and churches across Eastern NC — services start at $40/hour, with packages from $699 and a 15% discount for non-profits and churches. Get a free quote or see recent work.
Next in this series: Who Are Your Website Users, Really? (It’s Not “Everyone”)
This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work — informed in part by completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.