Have you had a discussion with anyone in the tech business lately that doesn’t involve the letters ‘U’ and ‘X’?

User Experience (or UX) is the latest buzzword in the tech industry, and just like other buzzwords (‘Internet of Things,’ anyone?) most people using this term don’t really understand what it is or what it’s all about.

But there might be good reason why you should know more about User Experience and design if you have anything to do with the Internet (and by that, I mean anything to do with selling, buying, or working with the web).

User Experience Help

So now that you know what UX is, how do you develop it? If you’re not a designer and don’t intend to become one, there are still some fairly handy tools out there that will help you create a favorable user experience.

These tools include options to help you create a relatively plug and play website (things like WordPress, for example), eBooks and guides that will help you with things like how to create a good user experience and where to put what, and even some tools that will help you develop marketing materials that span past a site’s reach.

Great Usability and Research Testing Tools

Even if you think that you have the best design in the world, that design has to be tested - and more than once. The following tools will help with testing out the effectiveness of your design.

Woopra track, test, and find out what your users are doing on your site. Are they bouncing off? Where is this happening and why? Are they going through the whole site? Why is that happening? This tool will help you analyze it all.

Verify: this tool will help you create surveys that focus on design, so you can really see whether or not that fancy designer is worth his salt. Or, just figure out if your own design is as terrible as you may think. If you are thinking about a beta test, this tool will help you discover what people do and don’t like about your site - then you can fix it.

TryMyUI: I like this tool because it is unique. TryMyUI lets you see what users are doing and thinking while on your site - it’s all recorded in video in real time, too, so you can really see what is and isn’t working. Sounds useful, right?

Tools You Don’t Need

While many of the tools mentioned here will help you gain a better overall picture of your site and what does and doesn’t work, what you don’t need is a plethora of tools. In fact, using more than one concise and complete tool will simply confuse you and your team.

So, my advice when it comes to UX is to pick one tool and stick with it - after you have done your research into the best possible ways to create a stellar user experience, that is. Most importantly, now you can join in on the conversations when someone whips out the term UX and tries to sound important.