If you think UX is only about making a website look pretty or ensuring a button is easy to click, you’re not alone. But you’re also wrong.
If you think UX is only about making a website look pretty or ensuring a button is easy to click, you’re not alone. But you’re also so wrong we sometimes are losing sleep about conversations we have about UX with other marketers and even designers. Yes, you are right to assume we are in every way dramatic.
This misconception is unfortunately rampant in marketing—and it’s costing businesses real growth. If your job as a marketer is to steer the ship called growth, then your misconceptions are costing businesses some serious money. Treating UX (user experience) as window dressing rather than a core business strategy is like putting a new coat of paint on a sinking ship. It’s superficial, temporary, and ultimately just inefficient.
UX (User Experience) isn’t a checklist item, it’s not a buzzword to throw around. It’s the DNA of how your business interacts with its audience and users. It’s not just about good design; it’s about creating intentional, meaningful experiences that solve problems, build trust, and drive growth for a brand. To fully understand UX, you need to see it as more than just a tool in the marketer’s toolbox to make your work sound more meaningful than it is. It’s the foundation of your brand’s promise to its customers—a promise to understand, anticipate, and fulfill their needs seamlessly.
So, what are marketers getting wrong, and how can businesses fix it? Let’s dive in.
The first, and perhaps most damaging, misconception is that UX is purely aesthetic. Many marketers fall into the trap of equating UX with how something looks.
The sleekness of a design, the color palette, the animations—these are all important, but they’re surface-level elements. And let’s be honest, good design should be invisible because it is intuitive to users. And intuitive design is impossible when you’re only focused on aesthetics.
True UX goes much deeper. It’s about how a user feels when they interact with your brand elements, whether it be a website, app, contacting your service team, all of it. Are they confused, delighted, or downright bored? Those emotions play a far more significant role in driving user behavior than any designed embellishment ever could.
For example, imagine you’re on a website that’s visually stunning but impossible to navigate. You can’t find what you need, the load times are slow, the checkout process is cumbersome, and the hero moment text says something vague and unintuitive. The ‘beautiful’ design becomes irrelevant, because it actually doesn’t exist. The experience is a failure. Users don’t just remember how nice something looks; they remember how it made them feel, and how it worked to serve their needs.
Good UX never ends. It’s a seamless process of neverending research, innovation, creativity and strategy.
Many businesses approach UX as something you “fix” during a redesign and then forget about. But the reality is that UX is never finished. It’s a living, breathing process that evolves alongside your users’ needs and expectations which are ever changing.
Markets shift, technology advances, and user behaviors change. Your UX has to adapt or risk becoming obsolete. It’s not a box to be checked; it’s a mindset to be cultivated in your business.
Yeah, we’re sorry for the high horse we are about to get on.
This common-frustrating pitfall is limiting UX to digital products. While it’s true that UX is often discussed in the context of websites and apps, its principles apply far beyond the digital realm. They must.
UX is the sum of every interaction a user has with your business. It’s in the clarity of your pricing model, the tone of your customer service, and the ease of your onboarding process. It’s how they feel when working or buying from you, to how they feel when they no longer are. Every single touchpoint is an opportunity to deliver a seamless, thoughtful experience—or to lose a customer. Thinking business and brand when it comes to UX is what separates the wheat from the chaffs so to speak.
At its core, UX is about connection. It’s about understanding your users on a fundamental level: their goals, their pain points, their expectations. This requires empathy, not just data and aesthetic choices. You can have all the analytics in the world, but if you don’t take the time to genuinely understand your audience, you’ll never create experiences that resonate. Empathy is what transforms UX from a technical discipline into a human one. It’s what allows you to anticipate needs, solve problems, and build trust.
Bad empathetic UX is when you consider your preferences over market preference and kill a client company because you think their website looks cool.
But empathy alone, as important as it is, isn’t enough. UX also requires good strategy. Great UX aligns user goals with business objectives. While at its core, making things easier for your audience; it’s also about guiding them toward actions that create value for your business. This alignment is what turns UX from a cost center into a growth driver. It’s why companies like Amazon and Spotify dominate their industries: they’ve mastered the art of removing friction and creating pathways to conversion that support their business objectives.
When a designer or marketer doesn’t consider company goals, values and vision to influence experiences they create- they risk creating things that don’t support the most important user, the business they are building for.
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of UX is its iterative nature. Great UX doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of constant testing, learning, and refining. It’s about embracing failure as part of the process and using feedback to fuel improvement. This iterative mindset is what separates companies that thrive from those that stagnate. It’s not enough to get UX right once; you have to keep getting it right, again and again.
It should be one of the cogs driving the watch tower. Remove it, and time stops.
User experience (UX) design has become a critical factor in the success of businesses today. So now that we know the misconceptions to throw out the window, and what UX is, how can we generally use it to transform experiences?
When a website or app provides a seamless experience, customers are more likely to follow through with a purchase or contacting you to work together. It’s simple, makes their life easy, and wins their business.
A streamlined checkout process, or conversion process like a form, that eliminates unnecessary steps reduces friction, making it easier for potential customers to convert. Amazon’s one-click purchase feature allows users to complete transactions with minimal effort, which has contributed to their massive conversion rates. A quicker, easier process means fewer lost customers.
We’ve also seen this with our client Acme Salt Co. For a while, we noticed dipping conversion rates and many abandoned carts. Why? Well, there were key things users wanted but were missing. More product information in a friendly way, how to use the product to answer the unanswered ‘what do I do with this’, and to learn more about the brand and its superfans. Many think a product page alone with a description and some reviews is enough to sell, but it never is. We realized these users were ones who favored education and brand connection, so we tested and created new designs to meet that need and-boom, 10x’d their sales in one day.
See a gap or opportunity to meet a user’s need, and meet it innovatively and creatively. You will win their business, and if you’re smart, their loyalty. Which leads into the next point.
A well-designed user experience helps foster loyalty by making it easy and enjoyable for customers to interact with your brand. Spotify is a great example: the app’s intuitive navigation allows users to quickly find and listen to their favorite music, contributing to higher engagement and customer retention. Not to mention their unique playlists, AI informed DJ’s and endless artists to listen to- why would a user choose to listen somewhere else? They know their audience and speak right to them.
When you create positive user experiences and really see their needs, they’re more likely to return and recommend the business to others, boosting both loyalty and organic growth. Your objective is not just to gain the new customer, but to keep them.
Great UX does enhance usability—it also shapes how customers perceive your brand. When a user’s experience is simple and enjoyable, they associate those positive feelings with your brand, which builds trust. Apple’s design philosophy, known for its minimalist approach and intuitive interfaces, ensures that every interaction feels premium, reinforcing the brand’s reputation for quality and sophistication.
When you’re able to know your audience, and curate a brand experience that speaks directly to them, you build trust and authority. These are key emotional lexicons in creating loyal customers.
You have to care about creating memorable experiences, you have to mean what you say when you say,“ unreasonable quality and service”, because users are smart. They’re you! And you can snuff out fakes and you’re frustrated when someone promises one thing and delivers something else.
You need UX for branding, it is the core component of its philosophies. What does this person feel, when they interact with my brand?
Now that we’ve established how impactful UX can be, let’s look at how you can integrate it into your business strategy easily for better outcomes.
UX isn’t a buzzword or an afterthought—it’s the foundation of how customers experience and trust your brand. Businesses that get UX right don’t just compete; they lead and people follow.
The future of business growth lies in understanding the needs of your users and crafting experiences that meet those needs with empathy, strategy, and innovation. Companies that prioritize UX will not only see increased conversions and loyalty but will also set the standard for their industries. With the right approach to UX, your business can thrive by creating quality experiences in an increasingly overproduced world of businesses prioritizing mediocre quantity in hopes of more money than ever, over quality experience that protects and serves their audience.
Be the latter, fight for your audience and vision. You’ll win.
At Brandch, we approach UX design through a combination of Primal Branding, Good Strategy, and Unreasonable Hospitality. We believe that UX should not only solve problems but also tell a compelling story that resonates with your audience. Our design process begins with a deep understanding of your business, your customers, and your goals through our Primal Branding discovery and lens. We then apply, real applicable and not buzzword, strategic principles to create intuitive, memorable experiences that drive growth. By treating every touchpoint with unreasonable and excessive care and respect, we help businesses build lasting connections with their users and support their goals for growth.
