What does it take for a website to be successful? The careful planning and development to ensure quality user experience paves the way for the success of a website. Consider successful websites such as twitter, Facebook, amazon etc.; the reason for these websites to achieve success is that they have achieved optimal user satisfaction. Website design has emerged into an interactive design from a one-way static design.

What is a user experience design?

User experience can be defined as the level of the customer satisfaction achieved by the use of a product or a service. User experience design (UXD) is the design of a website in such a way that it enhances the user experience by improving readability, accessibility, performance, utilities, marketing and aesthetics of a website. A user experience designer studies and evaluates how a user feels about the system during interaction, value of the products etc., The job of a UX designer is to figure out how the design of the website can consciously affect the interaction of the users with the product.

Why is user experience design important?

Prior to the advent of the user-centered website design, the website design was mainly focused on the decision of the website designer and their clients. The website design was run on the perception that what the web designers deemed good is accepted by the users. There are 3.17 billion internet users worldwide, according to the statistics of 2015. The only opinion of the website designer or the collaborated opinion of the website designer and his client can’t be a practical way to enhance user satisfaction. In order to overcome all these shortcomings, user experience design is a very effective solution for enhancing user satisfaction. A website without a proper UX design is likely to fail. It is the root cause for many problems like server overloads, downtime errors etc.; UX design plays a key role in gaining the customers for complex websites, companies with small budgets and startup companies.

Benefits of UX design:

• ♦ More satisfied customers and increased user trust as the design is mainly based on the decision of the user.

• ♦ UX design tests the usefulness of the new products which are yet to be revealed.

• ♦ Reduced cost of ownership and support as the product doesn’t need any more documentation.

Tasks of a UX designer:

The UX designer has to study the emotions, needs and responses of customers to the digital product. The tasks he performs are:

♦ Evaluation of the current system,

♦ Comparison of two different user interfaces,

♦ Conducting user surveys,

♦ Development of wireframes of the layouts,

♦ Designing the flow of the users as to how they go through the website,

♦ Storytelling, teaching the information he has learnt.

For a complex website such as an e-commerce website, organizing all the products along with an easy-to- use secure payment method contributes to the success of the website while a poor UX design implies a risk of losses in revenue. Startup companies with good UX design can attract future traffic and business to the product. For the companies with small budget, the future traffic depends on the proper UX design.