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What can we learn about design from Netflix?
Learn UX and UI design tips from these 5 websites
As a designer, you’re not only designing the final polished UI, you have to think about the UX or user experience of the website. In this article, we’re dissecting 5 well-known websites to discover what we can learn from them and apply them to our web design projects.
But first, let’s cover some basics. What’s the difference between UX and UI and do you really need to know both as a web designer?
What is UX (User Experience)
User Experience, also abbreviated as UX, is a general term used to describe the overall experience a user has when interacting with a digital product like a website or an app. Some tasks a UX designer might work on for a project are user testing, user flows and journey maps, wireframing, design low and high-fidelity UI mockups, and create working prototypes. Essentially, UX includes the entire end-to-end process.
Wireframing is a crucial part of the UX design process, it’s how you map out content for individual landing pages as well as how these pages interact with each other to create a user journey. Wireframes can range from simple pen and paper sketches to low and high-fidelity designed mockups, each serves a purpose in the design process. You might want to quickly sketch by hand at the beginning of your design process to get more ideas flowing. Later, you’ll want to create high-fidelity wireframes to share your thinking and ask for feedback from a client or for user testing.
To learn more about wireframing including visual examples, check out Getting started with wireframing.
Also part of the UX design process is prototyping, where you bring your wireframes to life as if a user is actually interacting with your product. Here is an example of a prototype a UX designer might work on for an app. This is considered a high-fidelity prototype since there’s a good amount of detail in the wireframes and you have a clear sense of how a user might interact with the app.
