A new restaurant has a gorgeous website. The photographs glow, the menu is set in an elegant typeface, and the colours match the interior perfectly. A designer clearly worked hard on it.
Then you try to book a table. The “Reservations” link opens a PDF. The PDF asks you to email the restaurant. The email gets an automatic reply saying someone will be in touch within 48 hours. Nobody is. When you finally phone, the person who answers can’t find your email and asks you to spell your surname twice.
That restaurant has invested in its UI. It has neglected its UX. And the gap between the two has just cost it a table of four.
The terms “UX” and “UI” get used interchangeably, often in the same sentence by people selling web design. For a small business owner, the jargon can be off-putting. But the distinction behind it is simple, useful and surprisingly important, because it explains why a business can look wonderful and still be frustrating to deal with.
One Like insight: UI is how your business looks. UX is how it feels to deal with you.
Defining the terms
UI stands for user interface. It’s the part of a product people actually see and touch: the screens, buttons, menus, colours, typefaces and layout of a website or app. In a physical business, the equivalent might be a menu, a form, a sign or a counter. UI is about how things look and how you operate them.
UX stands for user experience, and it’s broader. The term was popularised by Don Norman, the cognitive scientist behind The Design of Everyday Things, who later co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen. Their definition is deliberately wide: user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” The international standard on human-system interaction, ISO 9241, takes a similar view, describing user experience as a person’s perceptions and responses before, during and after using something.
In other words, UI is one part of UX. A beautiful booking page is good UI. Whether the booking actually works, whether you get a confirmation, whether the restaurant has your details when you arrive and how you feel afterwards: that’s UX.
The useful thing about this distinction for a small business is that it moves the focus away from appearances alone. You can spend a lot of money making your website or shop look better without making the experience of dealing with you any easier. And customers judge you on the experience.
Highlight: You can redesign your website without improving your customer experience at all.
Why looks still matter
None of this means UI is unimportant. In fact, there’s good evidence that appearance shapes how easy people think something will be to use.
In 1995, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, researchers at Hitachi’s design centre in Tokyo, asked people to evaluate 26 different layouts for a cash machine screen. Each layout offered the same functions; only the arrangement differed. Participants rated each one on how attractive it looked and how easy it seemed to use. The researchers found that judgements of ease of use were more closely linked to how beautiful a layout looked than to how usable it actually was. Their conclusion, presented at the CHI 1995 conference, was that designers should improve not only how usable an interface really is, but how usable it appears.
This became known as the aesthetic-usability effect: people tend to perceive attractive designs as easier to use. Later research has added an important caution. The original study showed a correlation, and attractiveness doesn’t make a confusing process work. It can make people more patient with small problems, but it can’t rescue a booking system that loses their details.
So good UI matters. It creates a positive first impression and buys you a little goodwill. But that goodwill is spent quickly if the experience behind it doesn’t deliver.
[Infographic placement] UI and UX, as an iceberg. Above the waterline, labelled UI (what customers see): logo, colours, photos, layout, buttons, signage. Below the waterline, much larger, labelled UX (what customers experience): how easy it is to find what they need, how long things take, whether bookings and payments work, how quickly you reply, how problems are handled, how they feel afterwards. Caption: Attractive design earns patience. Good experience earns loyalty.
Highlight: A beautiful design earns you patience. Only a good experience earns you loyalty.
UX beyond screens
Because the Nielsen Norman definition covers every interaction with a company, user experience isn’t just a digital concept. For a small business, it includes the phone call, the quote, the email reply, the parking, the waiting area, the invoice, the follow-up and the way a complaint is handled. A customer doesn’t separate your website from your service. To them, it’s all one experience.
That’s why the most common UX problems in small businesses happen in the gaps between things. The website promises a quick response, but the inbox isn’t checked at weekends. The online form collects details, but staff ask for them again on the phone. The booking confirmation gives an address, but not the information that the entrance is round the back. Each part might be well designed on its own. The experience fails at the joins.
One helpful way to see this is to walk through your business as a customer would, from the first search to the final payment and beyond. Do it on a phone, because that’s how most people will meet you. Note every moment where you have to wait, repeat yourself, guess what to do next or feel unsure whether something has worked. Those moments are your UX problems, and most of them have nothing to do with how the website looks.
Highlight: UX problems usually live in the gaps between things that each work fine on their own.
What this means for a small business
Before you spend money on a redesign, find out whether your problem is UI or UX. If customers say your website looks dated but still book easily, a visual refresh may help. If they find you attractive but struggle to book, pay or get a reply, a new look won’t solve anything. Fix the experience first, then make it beautiful.
When you do work with a designer or developer, ask them to show you the customer journey, not just the homepage. Ask how a customer will book, what they’ll receive afterwards, what happens if something goes wrong and how it all works on a phone. A good designer will welcome those questions.
A few questions can help:
- Where do customers most often get stuck, wait or have to repeat themselves?
- Are our complaints about how we look, or about how hard we are to deal with?
- Does our online experience match what actually happens when customers arrive?
- Have we walked through our own customer journey, on a phone, recently?
Which brings us back to the restaurant with the beautiful website and the booking PDF. The fix doesn’t require a new design. It requires a simple online booking tool, an instant confirmation and someone who checks reservations every morning. Once that works, the gorgeous photographs will finally be doing the job they were meant to do: making people look forward to a meal they’ve already booked.
Sources
- Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, “The Definition of User Experience (UX)”, Nielsen Norman Group, quoted via Northern Arizona University Experience Design.
- ISO 9241-210, Ergonomics of human-system interaction, definition of user experience (as summarised in secondary sources).
- Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura, “Apparent Usability vs. Inherent Usability”, CHI ’95 Conference Companion, ACM, 1995.
