What is UX design, and why does a web team want to talk about it before anyone draws a page? In short, it decides how easily your customers find what they came for, understand your offer and finish what they started. This guide skips the jargon: UX vs UI, the steps on a website project, what it changes for your business and what you can test yourself.
What is UX design, in plain words?
UX design is planning a website from your customer's side of the screen. Before anyone picks colours or fonts, it answers a few questions: who visits, what they want to get done, what they look for first and where they're likely to get lost. Then the pages, words and buttons are arranged so that path is as short as it can be.
The Nielsen Norman Group, the UX research firm founded by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, defines user experience broadly: every part of a person's interaction with a company, its services and its products. Its first requirement is meeting the customer's exact needs without fuss or bother. Simplicity and elegance come next.
The international standard ISO 9241-210 says something similar: user experience is a person's perceptions and responses that come from using a product, system or service, or from expecting to use it. That includes feelings, comfort, behaviour and what they got done, before, during and after use. For a website, the experience starts at the search result and doesn't end when someone clicks “Send”.
So UX design keeps asking one question: can this person easily do what they came here to do? If the answer is “sort of”, they leave for a competitor's site or call you to ask what your site already says.
UX vs UI: what's the difference?
UI (user interface) is the part people see and touch: buttons, menus, colours, type and icons. UX is the wider job: the structure of the site, the words on it, the steps in a form, the speed, and whether all of it adds up to getting something done. UI is one layer of UX, not a replacement for it.
The Interaction Design Foundation describes UI design and usability as important parts of UX design, but subsets of it. That's why you'll often see “UX/UI design” offered as one service: two layers of one piece of work, usually done by the same people on a small or mid-sized project.
A quick example. A website looks beautiful, yet its “Request a quote” button opens a form with a long list of required fields, and after sending it nobody can tell whether it went through. The UI is fine. The UX is not.
| Question | UX (user experience) | UI (user interface) |
|---|---|---|
| What it asks | Can people easily do what they came for? | How does the screen look and behave? |
| What it covers | Goals, structure, navigation, wording, form steps, speed | Colours, type, spacing, icons, how buttons and fields look |
| What it produces | Sitemap, user journeys, wireframes, prototype, test notes | Page designs and a design system the developer turns into code |
| How you check it | Watch real people try a real task | Check that screens are consistent, readable and easy to tap on a phone |
What are the UX process steps on a website project?
On a website project, UX work happens before design and code, and it runs in a loop: understand the people, write down what they need, sketch a solution and test it. When a test shows a problem, the sketch changes and gets tested again. Redrawing a wireframe is far simpler than rebuilding a finished, coded page.
The loop isn't an agency invention. ISO 9241-210 describes four human-centred design activities: understanding the context of use, specifying user requirements, producing design solutions and evaluating them against those requirements, repeated until the requirements are met (summary by NIST). On a typical business website, that turns into five steps.
The five UX steps on a website project
Research
Conversations with you and, where possible, a few of your customers: who visits, what they look for and what they ask by phone and email. If you already have a site, the analytics show where people leave and what they type into the site search.
Structure
The sitemap and the menu. Pages get the names your customers use, not your internal ones. This is also where the main paths are decided, such as how someone gets from the homepage to a booking.
Wireframes
Plain grey sketches of the key pages, with no colours or photos. They show what's on each page and in what order: headline, benefits, price, form. A wireframe keeps the discussion on content instead of on whether you like blue.
Prototype
A clickable model, often made in a tool such as Figma, that you can move through like a real site. It lets you try an idea before a single line of code is written.
Usability testing
A handful of people from your audience try real tasks on the prototype, such as finding a price or booking a call. The places where they get stuck are fixed, then tested again. Testing carries on after launch, with real visitors.
Can UX be improved on an existing website?
Yes, and an existing site has one advantage: you already have data on how people use it. UX work can go page by page, starting where you lose the most people, which is often the enquiry form or the pricing page. On SofiFonds, for example, our work was a back-end rebuild together with UX improvements. If your site needs a review like this, our web design and UX page explains how we can help.
What does good UX change for your business?
Good UX means the website does its job without you standing next to it: people find what they need, understand what you offer and finish the enquiry or order. The gain isn't only more enquiries. It's also fewer questions the site should have answered, and less rework later.
- People find things. A clear menu and page names in your customers' words mean nobody has to hunt for the price, the opening hours or the contact details.
- Forms get finished. Only the fields you need, error messages that say what to fix, and a clear confirmation once the form is sent.
- Fewer support questions. When the site answers the common questions plainly, your team gets fewer calls and emails asking the same thing.
- The page feels fast and steady. Google measures this with Core Web Vitals: the main content should load within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shouldn't jump around while it loads.
- More people can use it. Clear structure, good contrast and forms that work with a keyboard also help people with low vision or limited movement. Since June 2025, many online shops in the EU have to meet accessibility rules by law; our guide to the European Accessibility Act requirements for websites covers them.
No honest source can promise a set percentage of extra enquiries from UX work. It depends on how many problems the site had and what you change. So measure it: the same pages and the same goal, before and after.
What are the signs a website has UX problems?
UX problems rarely show up as “bad design”. They show up in daily work: customers ask what the site already says, forms get started but not sent, and the site is awkward on a phone. If several of the signs below sound familiar, a usability check is worth doing before anything else.
Signs your website has UX problems
- Customers call or email to ask for prices, opening hours or other details that are already on the site.
- Your analytics show many people opening the enquiry or checkout form and far fewer sending it.
- People use the site search to look for pages that are in the menu, so the menu isn't working.
- The menu uses your internal names for things, not the words your customers use.
- On a phone, text needs zooming, buttons are too small to hit or the menu covers the content.
- Content jumps while the page loads, and people tap the wrong button.
- After sending a form, it's unclear whether it arrived and what happens next.
- A new colleague can't quickly tell you where the price or the contact details are.
How do you run a usability test yourself?
A small company can run a simple usability test without special software. You need a few people who resemble your customers, a few real tasks, and the patience to watch without helping. The Nielsen Norman Group calls this kind of user testing the most basic and useful usability method there is.
- Find five people who resemble your customers. Colleagues from another department or friends will do, as long as they don't know your site well.
- Write three to five real tasks, for example: “Find out what service X costs” or “Book a consultation for next week”.
- Ask them to think aloud, and don't help. Your job is to notice where they hesitate, what they look for and what they read differently from how you meant it.
- Write down problems, not fixes. If several people get stuck in the same place, that's the first thing to change.
- Fix it and test again. Several small rounds teach you more than one big one.
Why five? In Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users, Jakob Nielsen shows that, in his model, a first round with five participants finds about 85% of the usability problems. Each extra person mostly repeats what you've already seen. That holds for qualitative tests, where you watch what happens, not for studies that need statistics.
Frequently asked questions
What is UX design, with an example?
UX design is planning how easily people can do what they came to a website for. On a clinic's website, for example, UX design decides that “Book an appointment” sits at the top of every page, that the form asks only for the essentials, and that the patient sees a clear confirmation afterwards. The colour and font of that button are UI; the path to a booked appointment is UX.
What does a UX designer do?
A UX designer finds out who uses a website and what they need, then shapes the site around that. The day-to-day work is interviews and analytics, sitemaps, wireframes, clickable prototypes and usability tests with real people. On smaller projects the same person often handles the UI as well, turning the wireframes into finished page designs.
Does a small business website need UX design?
Yes, though the UX work will be small too. Even a five-page website has to answer the questions customers arrive with and lead them to one clear next step: a call, an enquiry or an order. For a small site, UX can be a few conversations, a simple sitemap, wireframes for the key pages and a short test with a handful of people before launch.
Is UX the same as usability?
Not quite. Usability measures how easy an interface is to use: how fast people learn it, how quickly they finish tasks, how many mistakes they make and how pleasant it feels. UX is wider. It also asks whether the site offers what people need at all, and it covers the whole experience before and after the visit. Usability is one important part of UX.
How many people do you need for a usability test?
For a simple qualitative test, five people from your audience are usually enough. In Jakob Nielsen's model, five participants uncover most usability problems, and each extra person mostly repeats what you've already seen. It's better to run several small rounds: find the problems, fix them and test again. If you need reliable numbers for statistics, you need far more people.
When should UX start in a website project?
At the very start, before design and code. The first decisions on a project are which pages exist, what they're called and in what order people move through them. Those choices shape both the design and the code, so changing them late costs more. On an existing website, UX work can start at any time, beginning with the pages where people most often give up.
