UX

What it means

UX is how a product is actually used: whether a person understands what to do, how many steps it costs them and whether they can recover from a mistake. It is not graphics, though related.

In business software it shows up as errors: a badly designed form produces wrong data that someone later fixes in the books or explains to an inspector.

UX is broader than the user interface. The interface is what a person sees on screen; UX is the whole journey: the confirmation e-mail, the wording of an error message, the wait for a page to load and how the page behaves on a phone. A handsome screen with a confusing flow is good graphics and bad UX.

How it works in practice

Design starts with a wireframe and the question of what the user must achieve. Visual design comes after. That order saves the most money: changing a sketch is cheap, changing a built system is not.

On customer-facing interfaces measure conversion and run an A/B test. On internal systems, watch people work and count the clicks a routine task takes.

On a client portal for uploading documents we saw that every extra step meant documents arriving after the deadline. Once an upload is just a phone photo, with no logging in through three menus, document digitisation runs continuously and the month-end close is not held up waiting for paperwork.

What to watch out for

The most expensive UX decisions are made unknowingly: one extra required field, no format validation, a button with no confirmation. Each creates work that repeats thousands of times.

A redesign to management’s taste with no measurement before and after. A new order page or landing page can look more modern and sell less, and without a comparison against the old version the company blames the season for the drop and looks for the cause elsewhere.