04 Nov Why Good Websites Start With Users, Not Layouts
*Part 1 of Start the UX Design Process — a series on the UX principles I use in client work.*
Most website projects start the same way. Somebody opens a competitor’s site, points at it, and says, “I want something like that, but for us.” Then the whole project becomes a layout hunt: pick a homepage style, pick a color scheme, pick a slider, and hope the business results follow.
Sometimes they do. Often they don’t — and the reason is simple. The project started with the layout instead of the people who have to use it.
I have been building websites since 2009, and the projects that hold up best share one habit: they start by understanding the user before anybody sketches a page. In the UX world that habit has a name — empathize — and it is the first step in a three-part way of working: understand people, name the real problem, then generate ideas. This series walks through those three parts the way I actually use them on small business and nonprofit websites. No jargon without an explanation, no course recap, just the process in plain English.
### The layout-first trap
A layout is easy to argue about. Everybody has an opinion on it, and everybody can see it. That is exactly why it is a trap. A layout answers the question “what should this look like?” before anybody has answered the harder question: “what is a visitor trying to do here, and what is getting in their way?”
I have seen beautiful homepages that buried the one thing visitors wanted. A festival site with a gorgeous hero photo and no clear path to the schedule. A church site with a polished design where a first-time guest could not tell what a Sunday morning actually looks like. A nonprofit site where the donate button was there, but the story of what a donation does was three clicks away. None of those sites failed because they looked bad. They failed because nobody started by watching what visitors were trying to do.
A layout chosen before that understanding is a guess dressed up as a decision. Sometimes you guess right. Usually you pay to fix the guess later, after launch, when changes cost more and visitors have already bounced.
### What starting with users actually looks like
Starting with users does not mean a six-month research project. For a small business site, it usually means a handful of honest conversations and a little careful watching, before any design work begins.
Who is coming to the site, and why? What are they trying to get done in the moment — on a phone, in a hurry, maybe with a kid in the back seat? What have they already tried, and where did they get stuck? What do they worry about before they call, donate, register, or book?
For [NC Freedom Fest](/portfolio/nc-freedom-fest/), those questions split “attendees” into real moments: the parent checking the lineup in the car before the gates get busy, the family looking for parking and what is accessible, the sponsor deciding whether the event is worth their name. Same website, completely different jobs. A single layout cannot serve all of them well unless you know those jobs exist first.
### Empathy is understanding, not pity
It is worth getting one word right, because it shapes the whole series. Empathy here does not mean feeling sorry for your visitors. It means understanding what they feel and think in the moment they are trying to use your site — well enough that you can anticipate what they need next. Pity keeps you at arm’s length. Understanding puts you in their seat, and that is the seat the design has to work from.
That kind of understanding is a skill, not a personality trait, with a few learnable habits. Ask lots of questions, favoring what, how, and why — they invite stories, not grades. Watch the whole person, not just their words: hesitation, a squint at a small screen, a sigh at a long form. Listen all the way through instead of planning your reply. Ask people who are not already on your side — friends and staff will mostly tell you what you want to hear. And keep your own opinions out of the room while you listen. Those habits are the engine behind every post that follows.
For [First Baptist Church of Goldsboro](/portfolio/first-baptist-church-of-goldsboro/), the split is just as sharp. A first-time guest on a Sunday morning wants service times, what to expect, and where their kids go. A long-time member wants the next event and how to sign up. If you design for “visitors” as one blob, you serve neither person well. If you start by listening to both, the structure of the site almost designs itself: the guest path and the member path become obvious, and the homepage stops trying to say everything to everybody at once.
That is the payoff of starting with users. The design decisions get easier, because they stop being taste debates. You are no longer arguing about whether a section should be blue or green. You are deciding which job gets the clearest path, and that is a question you can actually answer.
### The three parts, in plain English
The rest of this series follows the same three-part rhythm I use on projects, and it is worth naming them up front so you can see where each post fits.
First, empathize: learn from real people, in a deliberate order. Set the research goal first — what exactly do you need to learn? — then interview, then organize what you heard into empathy maps that surface the real pain points, then group those into personas. That is posts two, three, and four, in that order, plus the journey maps in post six, which are just organized ways of remembering what you learned. The order matters: interviews without a goal wander, and personas built before any interviews are just guesses with names.
Second, define: turn what you learned into three clear sentences — a problem statement, a hypothesis statement, and a value proposition. That is post seven, and it is the step most projects skip. A good problem statement names a person, their goal, and what stands in the way, in one sentence. Get those sentences right and the design gets dramatically cheaper, because half the arguments about taste just evaporate.
Third, ideate: generate lots of ideas before you fall in love with one. Post eight covers how to do that fast — including a timed sketching method called Crazy Eights — and post nine covers how to choose what to build first when you cannot build everything.
Notice what is not in that list: layouts, color palettes, and sliders. Those come later, and they come easier, once the first three parts are done. A layout built on top of real understanding is not a guess anymore. It is an answer.
### Try this before your next redesign
Before you approve a single mockup, write down three answers in plain words. Who is your most important visitor? What is the one job they most need to finish on your site? Where do they get stuck today?
If you cannot answer all three without guessing, that is not a criticism — it is the project brief. Those three answers are the cheapest, highest-value work in the whole redesign, and they cost conversations, not invoices.
The next post in this series covers how to get those answers: how to listen like a designer, with empathy interviews and research a small business can actually do.
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*Need a second set of eyes on your site? I build and redesign websites for small businesses, non-profits, and churches across Eastern NC. [Get a free quote](/) or [see recent work](/web-design/).*
*Next in this series: [Listening Like a Designer: Empathy Interviews and Research a Small Business Can Actually Do](/empathy-interviews-small-business-website-research/)*
> *This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.*