If you are launching any product, regardless if it’s a bold startup idea or a side hustle to help you earn a few bucks, UX should always be front and center of your strategy. UX is user experience, i.e., the impression that a potential customer gets when they view and interact with your product. While it’s a sophisticated and complex field, its fundamental principles remain the same. They might be worlds apart, but the same principles of UX theory would have the same foundation for a grocery store manager deciding where to put the cash register and fresh fruit as it would for an app developer deciding how their product functions for someone downloading it from the App Store.
Of course, UX is an important factor in web design. And if you are building a website for your business or as a means to promote your work portfolio, you need to consider how visitors to the site are going to feel when they get there. And, perhaps frustratingly, there is no single set of rules to follow. For instance, if you are selling a simple product, a clear outlay and high functionality of the selling flow process might be of the highest priority. If you have a website showcasing your NFT art but are not making direct sales, then something bolder will likely be called for.
There are no rules for design
When it comes to the design of the website in terms of aesthetics, the rules – if there are any – are even more flexible. You can find platforms that offer website design inspiration, with examples from real businesses and startups, showcasing the wide breadth of different styles and themes you can go for. While there is no set style for each type of business, factoring in UX means there are certain expectations from the website visitor. If, for example, you were to visit a photography website, you would be fairly disappointed to find a dull, static website without any impressive visuals. However, we should also stress here that there can be confusion between UX and UI. The latter refers to User Interface, which is more about what the user sees. UX is more about the functions; what’s under the hood of the car.
It’s clear that many of the principles of UX for websites overlap and enhance each other. That rings true in one of the most oft-cited strategies for UX design – the Honeycomb. Created by Peter Morville, an ex-Google executive, the User Experience Honeycomb is widely regarded as a useful tool for anyone building a website or app. One of the reasons for its importance is the fact that (as hinted above) there should be a connection between the UI and UX. That was one of Morville’s stated goals, to “bridge the communities of user experience and experience design.”, when he created the first diagram for Honeycomb back in 2004. Almost two decades in technology is a long time, so you might naturally think Morville’s creation, made in an era years before the first iPhone, is obsolete, but as we mentioned earlier, the underlying principles of UX remain universal.
Below is an image of Morville’s UX Honeycomb:
The three core principles used by Morville were “Usable, Useful, and Desirable”. He then added “Findable, Valuable, Accessible, and Credible”. As mentioned, many of these terms, like “findable” and “accessible”, while not wholly synonymous, are certainly complementary of each other. Let’s break them down:
- Usable – the website should be easy to use, simple (in terms of usability), and familiar (non-confusing).
- Useful – the website must fulfill a need, even if it is not selling something directly.
- Desirable – the website should look good and evoke emotions in the visitor.
- Findable – the website’s core product must be easy to locate, as should any solution to a problem.
- Valuable – the website should add value to the core product.
- Accessible – the website needs to be accessible to all, factoring in visitors with certain disabilities.
- Credible – the website needs to lend credibility to the core product, fostering trust in the visitor.
A danger of complacency
One of the dangers of the Honeycomb UX strategy is the obviousness of the different elements. In fact, it felt almost patronizing to explain some of them above. After all, who is going to design a website that is not usable? And don’t all websites have a use, even if they are arbitrary ones? But despite the obviousness, many of those elements can simply be ignored, and it can spell disaster for your business or project that you have launched on a website.
Finally, we should talk about something that is often overlooked in this area: Namely, that UX is fluid. At any given point, consumers can have fixed expectations of what a website or digital product should look like. Take, for example, streaming services today – Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and so on. They all offer almost identical UX, even if some of the aesthetics are slightly different. But will it remain that way forever? It would be myopic to make that assumption. A new way of doing things can come suddenly, in much the same manner as the iPhone blew Blackberry out of the water in 2007.
In the end, your website should be an extension of your product, even if your product is you. It should say something about you and the values of your business idea. In that sense, every website is going to be different, even if only marginally so. But the core principles of UX must be respected and adhered to, even if each of us interprets those core elements slightly differently. Doing that will amplify your business, as it charts a pathway for customers to interact with your core product.
