The best websites aren’t built using standard templates or personal intuition. They’re customized and crafted through a deep understanding of the people who will use them.
The best way to develop that understanding is through user research and taking time to study user needs, patterns, friction points, and behavior triggers. Assembling a website blueprint with those elements in mind means you’re intentionally designing for the user experience (UX).
UX design ensures a website is beautiful, functional, accessible, and navigable. Done well, UX design drives better SEO performance, higher engagement, increased conversions and stronger brand loyalty. When UX expertise is woven into a website design effort from the beginning, it helps mitigate the risks of misaligned layouts, confusing navigation, or accessibility oversights that can erode a site’s effectiveness and impact.
The Value of UX Research
In this article, we dive deep into website UX and examine the value of conducting disciplined UX research, and then applying what you learn to your web design. We’ll share insights, techniques, and examples of how smart UX choices improve visitor experiences, increase user engagement, and pay back your investment in this strategic approach.
In the process, we’ll recommend the best tools to include in Your UX Research Toolkit and share our complimentary 10-Point UX Checklist to help you gauge whether your web project is UX ready.
To provide the answers you seek, we recruited a trio of Culture Foundry thought leaders to share their knowledge through a virtual panel discussion on essential UX topics.
Our Panel of UX Experts
Sales Director
Senior Designer
Web UX Consultant
Your UX Research Toolkit: Panel Discussion
JKL: Let’s kick things off with a question about strategy — When you’re beginning a web design project, how do you conduct UX research and what methods do you use to surface great user insights?
ADAM: It really depends on the project, but I always start by asking: What’s the best way to understand what users actually need and care about? For me, one-on-one user interviews are ideal. They’re the most direct way to hear how people think, what they struggle with, and why.
But when that’s not possible, I often talk to front-line staff, like customer service, sales, or support teams, since they hear from users all day long. You just have to be mindful of bias when relying on secondhand input.
I also review any previous research the organization has done, like surveys, customer feedback, or usability studies, so we don’t start from scratch. If there’s enough data, I’ll run NLP analysis on form submissions or support tickets to spot common patterns in how people describe their needs or frustrations.
On the data side, I use tools like Google Analytics or Heap to see what people are doing on the site. But metrics only tell you what’s happening, not why, so I use that to guide or validate what I hear in the qualitative research.
Finally, unmoderated testing platforms like TryMata or UserTesting are super helpful for getting honest, in-the-moment reactions from users. They help you test assumptions, find friction points, and set a benchmark before making changes.
JKL: How do you go about crafting user personas to use in your UX research?
TANYA: Creating impactful user personas starts with purpose and ends with empathy. Our approach ensures every persona is backed by research, aligned with business goals, and practical for design teams to use throughout the project lifecycle.
We start with business goals and uncover the website’s primary objective — whether it’s driving sales, increasing signups, or building trust — the goal is to clarify which users we need to focus on. Here’s a helpful outline to follow:
- First, we gather real-world data by combining qualitative and quantitative research, such as:
- Analytics (behavioral trends, bounce rates)
- Interviews (user goals, frustrations)
- Surveys (user segmentation)
- Support logs (common issues)
- Next, we collate behavior patterns and group insights into 3–5 personas based on shared:
- Motivations and pain points
- Device use and tech comfort
- Decision triggers and usage context
- It’s important to humanize the profiles by giving each persona a name, photo, character quotation, and a brief narrative. Highlighting must-haves and deal-breakers for each persona helps to guide empathetic design decisions.
- When the time comes to apply personas to the design strategy, we’ll use personas to influence navigation, content structure, accessibility, and calls to action. In addition, we’ll integrate personas into planning, design sprints, and quality assurance checklists to ensure the design stays practical, consistent, and impact-driven throughout a web project.
Personas are more than research artifacts, they’re strategic tools that connect user insight to design execution, providing a strong alignment and foundation. When built well, they ensure your website works for the people it’s meant to serve.
JKL: Once you’ve established user personas, how do you use them in customer journey mapping?
TANYA: Once user personas are established, they become the lens through which we map customer journeys. A persona tells us “who the user is.” The journey map tells us “what the user experiences” as they interact with a brand or a website. The goal of this activity is to visualize each step a persona takes, uncovering pain points, emotional states, and opportunities to design a smoother, more intuitive experience.
Personas power journey mapping by anchoring the journey to a real user, such as a “Program Manager” or “Student.” Each map should represent a single persona’s experience and use their goals, motivations, and behavior patterns to define:
- The steps they take to complete a task (e.g., finding pricing, requesting a demo)
- The thoughts, feelings, and questions they have at each stage
- Their preferred channels or devices during each interaction
It’s important to plot touchpoints with purpose to align each phase of the journey (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty) with specific touchpoints like landing pages, emails, blog posts, support chats, etc. Then we ask, “Does this touchpoint support or hinder their progress?” The answer invites a deeper evaluation of how each interaction impacts the user’s experience and whether it helps them move closer to their goal or pushes them away.
It’s not enough to know what users do, you need to understand how they feel. For each step, we note the persona’s emotional state (confused, curious, frustrated, delighted). This reveals friction points and areas for UX improvement.
It’s important to identify and solve gaps and shortfalls in journey mapping, which include:
- Lack of depth: Mapping only the “happy path” and ignoring edge cases or drop-off moments.
- Too much internal bias: Designing around business needs instead of user needs.
- Inconsistent channel experience: Failing to ensure continuity across mobile, desktop, and offline experiences.
To avoid this, we validate maps with actual user feedback and analytics, and we don’t rely solely on team assumptions. We leverage tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, and Mouseflow to capture real behavioral data to verify the paths users are actually taking.
Pro Tips
- Always map one persona per journey and avoid trying to capture multiple user types in a single map.
- Include internal actions (e.g., what your team is doing behind the scenes) to identify workflow gaps.
- Revisit and revise maps periodically, especially after site updates or user behavior shifts.
Using personas in customer journey mapping transforms abstract research into actionable design insight. It allows you to prioritize features, content, and navigation that meet users where they are and move them closer to conversion. When done thoughtfully, journey maps prevent misalignment, reduce friction, and ultimately drive better user and business outcomes.
JKL: Are there analytics tools you use to facilitate UX research, and if so, which ones do you recommend?
ADAM: Google Analytics is the standard, but tools like Microsoft Clarity (free), Heap (HIPPA compliant), and CrazyEgg often provide more actionable insights. Heatmaps, click maps, and session recordings give you a clearer picture of how people actually move through a site, in addition to what pages they visit.
Some of the most useful things I look at are funnel reports to see where people drop off, and site search terms. I’ll often run those keywords through NLP or other analysis to uncover themes, common frustrations, or the language users naturally use.
Scroll depth can be useful, but it depends on the site’s goal. If someone finds what they need right at the top of a page and converts immediately, then not scrolling is actually a good thing. Scroll metrics only matter if the key content or call to action is buried lower in the page, and users are leaving before seeing it.
I also get a lot out of watching session recordings, especially when I’m trying to understand how people are using the navigation or where they’re getting stuck and looping back. That kind of behavioral insight can reveal pain points you won’t catch in aggregate data.
COLIN: The two analytics metrics I find most important for focusing my UX hypotheses are top-visited pages and top search terms, and Google Analytics does a great job of measuring and surfacing these metrics in its interface.
For me, these are the best indicators of “information scent;” they tell me exactly why users are showing up, what they are looking for, and what cues they expect to encounter when navigating the product. Behavioral tracking tools, like Microsoft Clarity, are also great for getting key signals from actual users on your existing site or application.
JKL: After conducting UX research with users, what is the best way to synthesize their feedback into an actionable UX design plan?
TANYA: Once we’ve gathered UX research (interviews, surveys, analytics, usability tests, etc.), the next step is to translate raw insights into focused, prioritized design actions. The goal is to move from what users said and did to what the product or content should do next.
We organize our findings and group feedback into categories, such as pain points, unmet needs, or behavior patterns. Once organized, the patterns and themes reveal design opportunities. These are things like repeated issues or goals across user types that we can focus on. For example,
- Tasks users struggle to complete
- Features they ignore or misunderstand
- Language or design elements causing confusion
We use a prioritization framework, like Impact vs. Effort or MoSCoW (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have), to define the UX priorities and group them by impact (quick wins, high-impact changes aligned with goals, backlog items for future phases, etc.) We align these priorities with business goals and technical feasibility as well. From here, we can translate the findings into design artifacts to illustrate recommendations and explore solutions, such as journey maps or wireframes.
Synthesizing UX research is all about filtering noise into clarity. It’s about turning user signals into design decisions that solve real problems. To do this effectively, we must stay user-led, prioritize ruthlessly, and always tie changes back to what matters: a better experience that is backed by evidence.
JKL: Once you have consolidated your user feedback into an actionable UX design plan, how does that translate into the wireframing process?
COLIN: For me, it mostly serves as a constant validation and revalidation tool that helps me focus each iteration of the wireframe or design. There might be some aspect of a product I’m designing that really excites me, but if the UX research is telling me that users’ attention is elsewhere, then I know to curb my enthusiasm, think like my users, and invest in what matters to them.
Also, designs can undergo rapid iterations and naturally (or accidentally) wander away from the research. So, a final step before submitting designs for broader feedback is to go back to the research and hypotheses and make sure I’ve stayed on track.
JKL: Web accessibility is always an important consideration in the design process; how can UX research enable an accessibility-first mindset in web design?
COLIN: The biggest factor is the ability for UX research to focus and narrow the scope of your product. Accessibility, like other aspects of design, demands attention to detail, and it benefits from having fewer details to attend to.
That said, by including individuals with disabilities in the early stages of user research, we better understand the everyday barriers they face and proactively build solutions to support their online experience. It all starts with being inclusive from the start of your project:
- Inclusive user testing: Conducting usability tests with participants who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, keyboard navigation, or voice input raises issues that automated accessibility tools often miss.
- Inclusive persona development: Incorporating accessibility considerations into user personas — such as including a user who is visually impaired, has limited mobility, or experiences cognitive challenges — reminds us that web design must work for a broad spectrum of users.
- Inclusive design approach: Research activities like empathy labs, user interviews, or “assistive tech shadowing” builds a shared understanding across web UX and design teams. We can better champion accessibility when we can see (and feel) the impact of an inclusive web design firsthand.
This approach elevates web accessibility from a requirement we need to fulfill to a core expression of intentional and responsible web design.
JKL: Once you have page layouts and design prototypes ready for review, how do you test them for UX optimization?
COLIN: I’m in favor of getting real versions of the product in front of the user as quickly as possible. You also then need to have a development pipeline that allows for rapid iteration to react to user feedback.
If you have identified certain key interactions or workflows in the product that you want to get early feedback on, it may be worthwhile to establish a mini-project that gets just that interaction in front of users in the existing product before the entire product relaunch goes live.
I typically only seek focus-group-style feedback on prototypes from friends or family or colleagues when I’m crafting unconventional interactions, and in those instances, the interaction is often so narrowly scoped that the investment required to create a high-fidelity prototype is worthwhile.
JKL: What role can clients and other end-users play in testing and improving a websites’ UX?
TANYA: Clients and end-users aren’t just participants in the UX process, they’re essential collaborators. When we lead UX-centered web projects, the best outcomes happen when we involve clients and users throughout the design and testing lifecycle — not just at the end. Let me break that down:
As strategic co-creators, clients bring deep institutional knowledge, organizational goals, and internal pain points to the table. That perspective is vital. When we bring them into usability reviews, prototype walkthroughs, or even card-sorting exercises, they help ensure that what we’re designing is aligned with both business needs and internal workflows.
End users are our experience validators and the individuals who ultimately judge whether the website works — and whether they trust it. Including them in task-based usability testing, first-click tests, or even lightweight surveys uncovers things no internal team could predict. We can learn more from watching five users struggle to complete a task than we do from weeks of design debate.
And because UX is not a one-and-done effort, clients and users should be part of post-launch testing too. User behavior often shifts once the site goes live. That’s where ongoing user feedback tools, analytics, and check-ins help us iterate and improve.
ADAM: Clients play a critical role, especially early on. They’re often deeply familiar with the pain points, even if they don’t always frame them as user challenges. The tricky part is that clients usually come to the table with solutions, such as “we want a video in the hero space,” or “let’s make the site more dynamic.”
My job as a UX strategist is to pause and ask, “What problem is this trying to solve for your users or for the business?” Most of the time, they haven’t asked that in a while, because they’ve already been deep in brainstorming mode. Reframing the conversation around user needs helps ground the strategy in real goals.
That said, I don’t think clients should be the ones testing solutions. They know the product too well and can’t replicate how a first-time user sees the site. You really need to involve actual end users in testing, especially before you launch. Otherwise, you risk spending a lot of time and money building something you’ll have to fix later.
There’s a great quote that sums it up: “A dollar spent on usability testing can save $10 in development and $100 in redesign.”
JKL: What advice do you have for marketing and website managers who want to provide a better user experience for their customers but need help convincing senior management to make the investment?
TANYA: If you’re a marketing or website manager striving to improve user experience but facing resistance from senior leadership, you’re not alone. The key to unlocking executive support lies in speaking their language — value, risk mitigation, and business outcomes — not just design or user satisfaction.
To build a compelling, boardroom-ready case, you’ll need to connect UX to business goals and frame user experience not as a “nice-to-have,” but as a direct driver of:
- Revenue (through improved conversions, reduced bounce rates)
- Retention (especially if your product is digital or membership-based)
- Brand equity (a modern, intuitive site builds trust and credibility)
- Operational efficiency (reducing support tickets through better UX)
Instead of saying: “We need a more user-friendly site.” Say: “A better user experience will reduce friction in our lead funnel and increase conversions by 15%, based on industry benchmarks.”
Use data and friction points as proof because nothing motivates leadership more than seeing where money is being lost due to UX gaps. Bring real data to the table, such as:
- Drop-off rates in key user flows (Google Analytics)
- User complaints or support tickets
- Session recordings or heatmaps (Hotjar, FullStory)
- Missed opportunities (e.g., high traffic pages with low engagement or poor mobile performance)
Show the cost of doing nothing and highlight the risk of inaction, such as:
- Falling behind competitors with better digital experiences
- Losing SEO visibility due to an outdated structure or slow load times
- Damaging user trust through accessibility or usability failures
- Inefficiencies that strain internal teams (e.g., difficult content editing or manual form follow-ups)
Position UX not just as an opportunity, but as a strategic safeguard against erosion of growth, engagement, and brand perception.
Package the investment as a phased strategy. Executives are more likely to greenlight a smart, phased roadmap than a single large overhaul. Suggest three phases. This shows you’re fiscally responsible and aligned with the long-term goals of the organization:
- Phase 1: UX research and audit to pinpoint high-impact fixes
- Phase 2: Targeted improvements (e.g., homepage, navigation, key flows)
- Phase 3: Full redesign or re-platforming, if needed
Bring outside validation and, when possible, reference:
- Industry benchmarks or competitors’ improvements
- Case studies showing ROI from UX upgrades
- Testimonials from trusted partners or advisors reinforcing your recommendations
And remember, to convince leadership, don’t pitch design, pitch impact. Use language grounded in metrics, efficiency, growth, and risk management. By positioning UX as a strategic enabler of business goals (not just a marketing initiative), you elevate the conversation to where decisions get made.
JKL: Tanya, Colin, Adam – Thank you for sharing your insights and advice, based on your professional experiences researching UX and integrating your findings into web design and development practices.
As promised, here is our 10-Point UX Checklist to help you determine whether your website project is UX ready. If you can answer in the affirmative to these important questions, chances are you’re ready to go!
10-Point UX Checklist for Your Web Project
1. Have you conducted proper user research (analytics, surveys, interviews)?
☐ Yes ☐ No
2. Do you have clear, documented user personas to guide design decisions?
☐ Yes ☐ No
3. Has a current sitemap and proposed new sitemap been created and validated with users?
☐ Yes ☐ No
4. Have you tested critical user journeys (e.g., checkout, signup, contact forms)?
☐ Yes ☐ No
5. Are you using heatmaps, session recordings, or usability tests to validate assumptions?
☐ Yes ☐ No
6. Have you used wireframes or prototypes to visualize new designs before development?
☐ Yes ☐ No
7. Has accessibility (WCAG/ADA compliance) been integrated into the design and testing process?
☐ Yes ☐ No
8. Has mobile-first and cross-device testing been conducted thoroughly?
☐ Yes ☐ No
9. Do you have post-launch UX monitoring (analytics, user feedback loops) in place?
☐ Yes ☐ No
10. Is there a plan for A/B testing or iterative improvements after launch?
☐ Yes ☐ No
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