What is UX? How easily a visitor reaches their goal

Polished is not the same as easy

UX, user experience, covers everything a person goes through when they use your website, app or service. A site can look polished and still lose every second visitor on a form. That site has good looks and poor UX.

UX reaches beyond the screen. Nielsen Norman Group, the research firm of Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, uses the example of a movie review site: even with a perfect search box, the experience is poor for someone looking for a small independent film that is not in the database. For a business that also covers how fast your pages load (measure it with our website speed test), whether prices and service areas are easy to find, and how soon someone hears back after a request.

Don Norman and the words user experience

Don Norman, a cognitive scientist, coined the term user experience in 1993 for his group at Apple Computer. He found words like interface and usability too narrow: he wanted a word for everything a person experiences with a product and the company behind it. In 1998 Norman and Nielsen wrote the definition their firm still uses: UX encompasses all aspects of the end user's interaction with the company, its services and its products.

The discipline is older than the word and sits in an international standard. ISO 9241-210 sets out human-centred design for interactive systems, from custom software to websites and apps. The first version came out in 2010, the current second edition in July 2019. Its core: design with and for real users, test early, and change what the tests show.

The button, or the road to it

UI stands for user interface: the buttons, fields, colours, type and screens a person works with. UI is what you see and touch; UX is whether it works and how it feels. A UI designer decides what a button looks like. A UX designer asks whether the button should be there at all, what it says and what happens after the click. A strong UI without good UX is a beautiful shop where nobody can find the till. Nielsen Norman Group draws one more line: usability is a quality of the UI (easy to learn, quick to use), while UX is the whole around it.

A quote form that loses half its visitors

Say a heat-pump installer near Hamburg gets 400 visitors a month on the Request a quote page, and 8 requests. The form has 12 fields: title, first name, last name, street, house number, postcode, town, phone, email, type of home, year built and a message box. Clear and Submit sit side by side at the same size. Anyone who makes a mistake only sees a red notice at the top after submitting.

Seen through UX, the problem is not the button colour. The visitor wants to know whether the installer works in their area and roughly what a heat pump costs; the form asks for their house number first. Nielsen Norman Group advises cutting every field you can ask later or work out yourself, putting labels above fields in one column, dropping the clear button and flagging errors at once and in words. In a study by Seckler and colleagues (CHI 2014), 78 percent of forms that followed such guidelines were submitted without errors on the first try, against 42 percent of forms that did not.

The new version asks five things: name, phone or email, postcode, type of home and the question. Address and year built wait for the site visit. If requests rise from 8 to 12 from the same 400 visitors, conversion goes from 2 to 3 percent. If one in four requests becomes a customer at 12,000 euros per installation, that is one extra job a month. These numbers are a worked example: what your form does, you only know by measuring before and after. Where visitors drop off earlier in the journey shows in your sales funnel; how to build a page around the question behind a search is covered under search intent.

One more request a month, in euros

UX does not have to be a months-long programme. Jakob Nielsen showed in 2000 that a test with five users finds about 85 percent of usability problems. His advice: three small rounds of five with a fix in between beat one large study with fifteen.

What it returns: more customers from the same visitors. Buying more visitors through ads or SEO costs money every month; a form that works better does its job for every visitor still to come. If you already pay for retargeting, you send people back to the same page: when that page leaks, you pay twice.

Accessible is also a legal duty in the EU

Since 28 June 2025 online shops and sites where consumers buy or book must be accessible across the EU, under the European Accessibility Act. Micro-enterprises are exempt. The standard behind it, EN 301 549, builds on WCAG 2.1 level AA: enough contrast, labels a screen reader can read out, everything reachable by keyboard. What that means for your site is in our guide to the European Accessibility Act, the answer on European Accessibility Act website requirements and our look at the first year of the law. Even without the obligation it pays: what works for someone with a screen reader also works for someone on a phone in bright sunlight.