What Is UX? User Experience Basics

If you’ve ever pushed a door that was meant to be pulled, you’ve already encountered a classic UX failure.

User experience is about how something feels to use, whether it’s a website, an app, or even a physical product. And while UX might seem like a design buzzword, **understanding the basics is essential for any team building products **people actually want to use.

In this article, we’ll cover the UX basic you need to know: what UX is, why it matters, and how getting the fundamentals right leads to better outcomes for both users and businesses.

We’ll also explore how companies put these principles into practice, including how Baymard’s UX Best Practice Guidelines help teams move from theory to high-performing, research-backed design.

What Is User Experience?

User experience refers to how someone interacts with a product or service and how that interaction makes them feel. It covers everything from the layout of a mobile app to the tone of a confirmation email, and even how fast a page loads.

At its core, UX is about removing friction. The goal is to make interactions smooth, relevant, and efficient, so users can get what they need without confusion or frustration.

When people land on your site, open your app, or use your product for the first time, they’re not just judging what it looks like — they’re experiencing how it works.

Good UX makes that experience feel smooth and intuitive. Bad UX creates friction: users hesitate, get frustrated, or give up entirely. And in most cases, they don’t come back.

Here’s a simple comparison:

Positive user experience

A customer buys a pair of shoes online. When they arrive, she realizes they don’t fit. But returning them is simple — the box includes a return label, and the website guides her through the process in just a few clicks. She gets a refund quickly and leaves with a positive impression of the brand.

Frustrating user experience

A business coach tries to start a private breakout room during a group video call. The interface is clunky, and after 10 minutes of searching, he gives up. The product technically has the feature, but it failed to make it usable when it mattered most.

These kinds of moments — invisible when everything works, glaring when they don’t — are what UX basics are all about.

When companies focus on user-centered design, they’re not just creating better interfaces. They’re reducing drop-off, increasing retention, and driving real business outcomes. It’s why many of the world’s top brands now treat UX as a competitive advantage — not just a design concern.

And with tools like Baymard's UX Best Practice Guidelines, teams can identify and solve UX blockers with research-backed recommendations, rather than guesswork.

User-Centered Design: The Foundation of Great UX

Behind every great user experience is a clear design philosophy: build around the user.

User-centered design (UCD) is the practice of putting user needs, goals, and behaviors at the heart of every product decision. Instead of guessing what people want, UCD involves research, testing, and iteration to ensure the product works for the people it's built for.

This doesn’t just apply to how something looks — it’s about how it works. From the first click to the final conversion, the entire journey should feel intuitive, helpful, and low-effort.

Done well, UCD leads to products that feel effortless to use — which is why it’s become a core strategy for digital teams across industries.

At Baymard, we’ve seen how difficult it can be to get this right without a structured approach. That’s why our UX Guidelines distill 150,000+ hours of UX research into specific, actionable insights. These guidelines help teams prioritize changes based on real user behavior — not opinion — and ensure that design decisions are aligned with user needs from the start.

The UX Design Process

Designing a great user experience isn’t about guesswork or one-off improvements — it’s a process.

The UX design process is how teams move from understanding user needs to delivering polished, intuitive products. While the exact steps can vary, most UX work follows a consistent flow:

1. Research: Understand the target audience — their goals, frustrations, and context. This might involve user interviews, surveys, analytics, or usability testing.
2. Define: Translate findings into clear problems to solve. This is where personas, journey maps, and user stories come in.
3. Design: Sketch, wireframe, and prototype solutions. At this stage, the focus is on structure and flow, not final visuals.
4. Test: Validate design decisions with real users. Testing helps uncover friction points early, before they’re baked into code.
5. Iterate: Refine the design based on feedback. UX is rarely one-and-done — great experiences are the result of multiple rounds of testing and adjustment.

For teams without deep UX expertise, this process can feel daunting. That’s where structured guidance comes in. Baymard’s research-backed UX guidelines map directly to each stage of this process, helping teams identify what users struggle with, and how to fix it, without starting from scratch.

UX Principles: The Core Elements of Great Design

While every product is different, the best user experiences tend to share the same core qualities. These aren’t just best practices — they’re principles that guide how users evaluate and interact with a product.

Hone of the most widely used frameworks in UX is Peter Morville’s UX Honeycomb, which breaks down the seven key elements of a meaningful user experience:

Each of these principles is simple on its own. But in practice, applying them consistently across a full site or product takes deep attention to detail.

That’s where structured guidance makes a difference. Baymard’s UX Best Practice Guidelines are built around these very principles — turning them into concrete, testable actions that improve usability, clarity, and conversion across the customer journey.

Common UX Pitfalls (and Why They’re Costly)

Even well-designed products can fail users if basic UX issues go unaddressed. These aren’t always flashy problems — but they show up in bounce rates, abandoned carts, and lost trust.

Here are two common UX pitfalls that teams often underestimate:

1. Slow load times Users expect speed. When a site lags, frustration builds — and conversions drop. In fact, nearly 70% of consumers say page speed impacts their willingness to buy. Even if speed issues stem from technical constraints, UX teams can still improve the experience through visual loading cues, progress indicators, or by prioritizing visible content first.

2. Poor mobile usability With over half of web traffic coming from mobile devices, a desktop-first design approach no longer works. Sites that feel clunky or incomplete on mobile frustrate users and push them away — especially during key tasks like checkout or form entry.

These pitfalls often fly under the radar because the core features "work" — but they don't work well. And that distinction makes all the difference.

Baymard’s large-scale usability testing has consistently shown that addressing just a few of these friction points can lead to significant improvements in conversion, trust, and retention.

The Value of Mastering UX Basics

Great UX doesn’t just make a product easier to use — it makes the product more likely to succeed.

When the experience feels seamless, users spend more time on a site, are more likely to trust the brand, and are far more likely to complete the actions that matter — whether that’s signing up, making a purchase, or coming back.

Companies that invest in UX tend to see higher conversion rates and lower abandonment, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and clearer product-market fit through ongoing feedback

And these gains aren’t limited to product or design teams. Marketers, developers, and business leaders all benefit from getting the basics of UX right — because better experiences drive better results.

That’s why UX is no longer a “nice to have.” In competitive markets, it’s one of the clearest ways to stand out.

Apply UX Best Practices with Baymard

Learning the basics of UX is a strong start — but applying them effectively is what leads to real impact.

That’s where Baymard comes in.

We’ve spent over 150,000 hours conducting usability research across leading ecommerce sites, identifying exactly what helps users succeed — and what gets in their way. All of that research has been distilled into over 700 UX guidelines, covering every part of the user journey: from site navigation and product listings to mobile UX and checkout flows.

With our Free Plan, you can access a curated set of 50 guidelines, drawn directly from that full research library. Each one includes examples and implementation notes to help you make meaningful improvements fast.

It’s a practical way to move from theory to execution without needing a full UX team.

Start with the Basics of UX Today!

Great user experiences rarely happen by accident. They’re the result of understanding what users need, removing unnecessary friction, and continuously improving based on real behavior.

Good UX is the foundation, whether you’re designing from scratch or optimizing what already exists. It’s not about chasing trends or redesigning everything at once. It’s about making better choices, consistently.

If you want to move from theory to practical improvements, the best place to start is with real, research-backed guidance.

Baymard’s Free Plan is designed for exactly that!

→ Sign up free to get 50 research-backed UX guidelines and start improving your site today.