What is user experience in IT?

In the world of digital products, such as websites, online stores and apps, there are fewer and fewer ways to stand out. Price, product range and promotions often aren’t enough to attract and keep customers.

So how do you win loyal users? Why does user experience help sales? We explain what UX is, what the user experience design process looks like and how it has changed in recent years.

What is UX, or user experience?

The most common definition of user experience (UX) is designing how people experience a product. In practice, it comes down to pinning down what users need and then designing the product to meet their expectations.

Put another way, the fate of every product, online or offline, depends on users’ experiences and emotions. If they’re good, meaning the product is satisfying and doesn’t cause frustration, users gladly come back to it and become loyal customers. If the experience is bad and the product puts people off rather than drawing them in, the exact opposite happens.

Why invest in UX design?

Thoughtful UX design guarantees that the product will hit the mark with its target audience and won’t be a hassle to use.

Is UX only about digital products and services?

Not just those. UX comes from the IT industry, but today user experience design also proves its worth in other industries, such as banking and retail, and in solving problems in the public sector. The methods are similar to those used in IT projects.

For example, if a government office has a problem with long lines, you can use UX methods to find out what causes them and make them shorter or get rid of them altogether. As a result, the usability of the office improves, just as it does for websites and web apps.

What are the benefits of UX in web products?

With websites and apps, which are the IT projects we mainly mean here, user journeys have to be simple and serve specific goals: make the site smooth to use, suggest next steps and guide the user. A well-planned, carefully thought-out journey delivers exactly what we expect: the user becomes a customer, and a conversion takes place.

So good UX brings several concrete benefits:

• Stronger sales: since users become customers, good UX translates into sales and the product’s popularity.
• Standing out in the market: there are plenty of similar products and services today. To get noticed, you have to stand out, and this is where user experience becomes decisive. If it’s positive, the brand wins loyal customers.
• Lower risk: with UX, we set goals objectively. As early as the design stage, we can spot pain points and drop ideas that could frustrate users or hurt the brand’s image. UX keeps an untested product from going to market.
• Time savings for the team: UX design methods help you prototype solutions quickly and test them for usability and relevance before the finished product is built. They also leave room to make changes, refine the idea and develop it further.

What are the stages of building a product with good UX?

The UX process is made up of various stages and methods that help you put yourself in the user’s shoes. For digital products, its core elements are:

• research,
• information architecture,
• strategy,
• content design,
• interface and interaction design,
• usability testing of the digital product.

That said, you can’t do UX by the book. This kind of design calls for an agile approach that looks at the product as a whole. Every UX process is different and depends on the budget, timeline and business goals. It’s shaped around each project to meet its needs.

How do we approach UX at 25wat?

We start with the business goal and the users, not with the visuals. For websites, the first stage is discovery and strategy: we define the website’s goal, target audiences, structure and keywords. Next comes the UI and UX design: wireframes and layouts in Figma, which we approve before development. Only then do we build the website in the chosen technology, and finally we take care of SEO, testing and launch.

For apps, we start with a product workshop where we define the problem, the user and the MVP scope. The UX/UI design covers screens, user journeys and a clickable prototype for approval. We test the app on devices, and after launch we keep developing it based on user feedback.

A UX perspective is needed at every stage, because a UX designer can always spot something and suggest ideas that may prove very important for the project later on. That’s why we work on the principle that the sooner a UX designer is brought in, the better for the project, including in terms of cost.

An example from our work: the ProteGO Safe app

From a user experience standpoint, a particularly interesting project for us was the ProteGO Safe app, later STOP COVID – ProteGO Safe (it ran until March 2022). Working on it, we had to meet many unusual challenges:

• A very broad audience: we had to design solutions for a very wide and diverse group that included both seasoned mobile app users and occasional ones.
• No standard patterns: we couldn’t use standard mobile app patterns, which called for creative solutions.
• Privacy protection: we couldn’t use any information about the user’s location.
• Limited analytics: another challenge was our limited ability to analyze user journeys.

We relied on surveys, focus groups and user reviews on the App Store and Google Play. We also made it possible for users to report their needs through a chatbot flow on gov.pl, for which we designed a detailed support journey.

Despite these constraints, working on ProteGO Safe was very rewarding. It was a highly creative project.

UX in 2026

The fundamentals of UX haven’t changed: the starting point is still the user and their needs. What has changed in recent years are the tools and the requirements:

• AI in design: AI tools let you quickly build a prototype from a plain-language description, for example in Figma Make. For web app MVPs, we use tools such as Lovable. But AI doesn’t replace research with real users: according to Nielsen Norman Group, AI-generated “synthetic users” often give shallow or overly favorable answers.
• Design systems in Figma: colors, spacing and other recurring values are stored in Figma as variables, and interface elements as components. Wireframes and prototypes use the same values, so a change, such as a new brand color, is made in one place. We build our wireframes and clickable prototypes in Figma.
• Mandatory accessibility: since June 28, 2025, rules implementing the European Accessibility Act have been in force in Poland (Polish Act of April 26, 2024, EU Directive 2019/882). Among other things, they cover consumer services in e-commerce and retail banking, so an online store or online banking, for example, must meet accessibility requirements, including for people with disabilities (the Act provides for transitional periods). The rules don’t apply to services provided by microenterprises.
• Mobile-first: Google indexes websites and ranks them in search results based on their mobile version. So the mobile version can’t be an add-on to the desktop design: the layout, content and user journeys have to work on a small screen from the start.

Planning a new website, online store or app? We’ll design it with your users in mind. See how our UX/UI design works and how we build web and mobile apps, or write to us and tell us about your project.

Already have a website and want to see where users get lost? Read why a UX audit is worth doing.