To a business, your website is where you present your face to the world

It is where you offer support, and try to sell products and services.

To your customers, your website is something else. It is an experience; it is a point of connection between them and you. And the quality of this experience hinges on interaction. 

This is why user experience design — and, alongside this, interaction design — is crucial. Let’s take a look at how both elements work and why they need to be implemented into your website design. 

How experience and interaction design work 

First, we need some definitions. 

Experience design refers to building the broader experience, this is called User Experience Design, or UX Design.

Interaction design is the crafting of the interactions that the user has with your website. This is called User Interface Design, or UI Design.

While both of these elements go hand in hand, and each relies upon the other, they are not interchangeable. As such, each is implemented a little differently during web design. 

How does experience design work?  

Think of one action you want your customer to carry out. Let’s say it’s buying a product. 

  • How does the customer feel when they navigate through the website?
  • How quickly can the customer navigate to this product to begin their interaction? 
  • How easy is the product page to understand? Is it immediately obvious what they need to do? 
  • Do they have all the information and functionality they need to complete the purchase? 

Answering these questions will help you understand the wider customer experience, and you can broaden this to cover the experience across your entire website. 

How does interaction design work? 

Let’s look at this via the same example — buying a product. 

  • How does your customer do this?
  • What buttons or tools must they use in order to complete the transaction? 
  • What do you want your customer to do?
  • Do you want them to purchase an add-on or sign up for dedicated support?
  • How can you achieve this without impeding the interaction? 

This is interaction design. Extrapolate this out across all the different interactions on your website when designing your page. 

Why are experience and interaction design so important to your website design? 

Without experience and interaction design, your website will not fulfil your business goals. Here’s why: 

  • If customers feel that their needs are not being catered to, they will head elsewhere — experience is the number one reason for this. 
  • Experience and interaction design help you better understand your customers. 
  • 86% of customers say they will pay more to enjoy a better customer experience. 
  • Improving customer experience with technical changes to your webpage increases conversions by around 74%. 
  • 48% of users judge a business’ credibility by its website — and this includes the experiences and interactions they encounter. 

Your customers are everything to your business, and so you must cater to their needs.

Experience and interaction design will help you to achieve this in a big way.