By Todd Gravestock, Creative Director
User experience (UX) sounds fairly intuitive and to some degree it is how someone interacts with a service or product and how that makes them feel or think about the brand.
UX covers every element of how someone interacts with your website as well as before they get there and after they’ve left.
However, curating UX (which is what we do as graphic designers, web developers and UX specialists) isn’t as simple as all that.
From our perspective, UX includes usability, design and branding which all crossover from a technical vs creative perspective.
Key statistics about UX
Before I get into the fundamental principles of UX, I wanted to outline why it was so important to get right in the first place.
Here are some key statistics that should hammer the issue home:
- 40 per cent of people will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load (Toptal, 2025).
- 32 per cent of people would leave a brand they used to love after just one bad experience (PWC, 2018).
- 70 per cent of Gen Z users want websites to intuitively know what they want and cater to it (WildernessAgency, 2021). *
- A 400 per cent increase in conversion rates can result from a “frictionless” UX design (Forrester Research, 2016).
In addition to these, a peer reviewed article by Gitte Lindgaard, et al., found that 50 milliseconds is all you have to make a good impression on your website.
That’s just 0.05 of a second to show someone that you’re worth buying from.
What are the fundamental principles of UX?
When it comes to UX, there are a few ‘laws’ that govern how users interact with digital platforms.
- Make key actions big, obvious and easy to reach
- Reduce choices to speed up decisions
- Follow familiar design patterns users already expect
- Keep options and information limited to avoid overload
- Group related items closely to show how they connect
- Focus on strong standout moments and a clean ending
One of the mistakes I see most often from the above list is people hiding calls to action and buttons out of sight.
So, when your user gets to the end of the bit they are reading, they find themselves without a clear action to take that moves them the next stage of the journey.
Most of the time, when this happens, they simply leave the site feeling lost and look for another site that fulfils their needs.
Equally, we can group a few of the laws above into a broader category of the phrase “don’t overcomplicate things!”
Too many choices or paths for the user to take simply slow them down in the sales process.
They need a direct line to follow from start to finish.
If all of this is starting to sound increasingly difficult, that’s because it is.
UX isn’t just making your website look pretty, it’s an active and ongoing process of testing and tweaking that results in further and further improvements to your conversions.
Applying all of this yourself will be incredibly difficult which is why so many people turn to agencies for help.
Ready to upgrade your UX design? Let’s talk!
*If 70 per cent of Gen Z users want websites to intuitively know what they want and cater to it, maybe that’s why so many of them are turning to ChatGPT and other AI platforms for searches rather than Google. We recently wrote an article on this subject if you’d like to learn more.
