The best website and app user experiences according to the experts

The UX experts weigh in on their favorite web and app user experiences and why they stand out from the crowd

User-centered design is now at the core of every innovative design, and ensuring your site or app’s visitors have a positive user experience is more important than ever.

Great user experience doesn’t just help your visitors get around your site, it triggers emotional connections and brings you closer to your users. But sometimes it can be tricky to get UX right, no matter how much advice there is out there to get your design noticed.

Lucky for you, we’ve been on the lookout for inspirational web and app user experiences to help you level up your UX design. And with the help of our trusty UX experts, we’ve come up with a host of awesome UX websites and apps to blow you away. Let’s take a look at how these top brands create great web and app UX. Read on for pro tips!

Kurt Stangl, Product Director Azuga Inc.

Kurt says: what is my favorite user experience right now? It’s a challenging question because the state of design is so spread out across the spectrum. At the high end, web design in 2018 facilitates human-computer interaction better than ever before. However, the obstacles designers and engineers face to shift the focus to design in the first place, or even to keep that design intact through the production process, is daunting.

When we visit design company sites and other high-end experiences in the tech sector, we enjoy rich, beautiful, and seamless experiences. But when it comes to paying our bills, buying goods and services online outside the giant companies, or even trying to understand privacy rights on thousands of web sites, it’s often next to impossible because of poor or missing design principles.

Design has improved so much so fast in the last few years. Designers have a considerable professional challenge in communicating a huge collection of very important and necessary design details. In fact, these details are so important because they represent a very real competitive business advantage that can make or break features, products, and even companies. This is why lean product prototyping is so important — it is the single best tool designers have to champion their cause through organizations and Just In Mind does it better than everyone else.

With that being said, here are my three favorite website user experiences:

LinkedIn: yes, I know that most professionals outside tech see it as Facebook for work but if you look past that, Jeff Weiner has done an amazing job running an enterprise product team with a keen eye on design. LinkedIn is truly a model for testing and shipping new designs at large scale that incrementally improves engagement.

Stripe: from the front-end introduction to the product, all the way through the sign-up conversion funnel and the tools for engineers to manage their back-end APIs for their business, Stripe really sets a standard for a modern successful business.

Wealthfront: for a busy tech guy, I don’t have time to play with stocks but I need an easy way to get my money working for me. This robo-investor product has high-quality experiences from the get go. From sign-up, to app download, to feeling secure and enjoying watching my net worth increase every month. Nowhere in the entire experience do I feel concerned about where my money is going. Managing my account is simple and enjoyable

Nick Babich, UX specialist and Editor-in-chief of UX Planet Medium publication

Nick says: my favorite app experience has to be Notes for iOS. I usually take notes on a mobile device (as the mobile phone is the nearest-to-me digital device) and the Notes app comes in handy for this purpose.

The app provides a really focused experience, which is great for mobile. As a user, I’ve enjoyed the features introduced in iOS 11 (such as scanning).

My favorite website experience? I really like Dropbox — it gets the job done without any unnecessary questions. When it comes to web services, I think reliability is one of the most important properties.

Jason Gerard Clauß, Founder and Director of UX at Claußcreative

Jason says: in an industry plagued by bad UX, there is one experience that stands out and goes beyond not sucking.

That is the desktop web version of Google Maps. Both eminently practical as a tool and addictive as entertainment, Maps gets a lot right.

A triumph of data visualization: Maps has mastered the abstraction of physical space to help the user understand what they are looking at while presenting a layer cake of information. They have accomplished this through a subtle color scheme free of “chartjunk”, (mostly) intuitive abstraction of a wide variety of objects and places, and the progressive disclosure of granular zooming that culminates in 3D buildings with alarmingly precise rendering.

It takes full advantage of Google’s wealth of data: the aforementioned progressive disclosure, showing the user only what they need to see, is only possible with the massive stockpile of information Google has on you and everyone else. Concerning as that is in other contexts, it makes Maps eminently useful on a daily basis.

It lets you feel like God: few online experiences are as satisfying as the Satellite mode of Maps. You can blast upward until the world is a living version of your old globe, complete with stars in their current location and the planet lit up as it is right now.

You can zoom in to view the weather around the world from space, or further in where you can soar over 3D scenery that feels like a video game, and if that isn’t enough, you can plop yourself down on the street of some surprisingly remote places, and you can do it all seamlessly with a mouse and keyboard.

And it does this all from your browser. Just stop and think about that for a second.

Megan Wilson, User experience specialist at WalkMe

Megan says: as a user experience designer, it’s always exciting to discover platforms that stay true to providing users with a seamless experience. I’d have to say that one of my favorite sites is Medium.

Aside from the abundance of insightful UX content, the site is designed in a simplistic manner that allows for painless user navigation while still including a unique design. The topic options are strategically placed on the top of the homepage, and are accessible for users to easily navigate the interface and discover content that interests them. The site even allows you to tailor your homepage to fit your personal interests so the first pieces you read are guaranteed to catch your interest.

Users today crave simplicity and a frustration-free experience. Similar to the experience WalkMe’s intelligence overlay provides of driving task completion and conversions by guiding users to action, Medium ensures that users will get from point A to point B with no hassle. Read more about WalkMe here.

Tim Moad, Founder at The Proto Process

Tim says: currently, despite my immense disgust for Adobe’s abuse of market monopoly in the visual design space, AdobeXD is very intuitive and easy to learn for those coming from a visual design background.

Honorable mention: Zeplin and Slack are a very strong collaboration force.

Shout out to this Justinmind fan: The UX person

(Twitter handle @UXPerson)

My favorite user experience is currently Justinmind. It’s really advanced and user friendly. The UI kits, Data Grids and interactions are amazing!

With the prototyping tool, I have built a backend web application for a printing house which handles order fulfillment, as well as a complete workflow for a design agency.

Please note that these the views and opinions expressed by the contributors to this post are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Justinmind.