Diseño web B2B
What Is UX Design and What Does It Solve on Your Company's Website?
Equipo Artisma
Agencia de Marketing B2B
The new website was approved in the boardroom, projected on the big screen: full-width photos of the plant, scroll animations and a minimalist four-word menu. Three months later, the sales director notices that quote requests coming in through the website have fallen to less than half and that longtime customers are calling to ask for what they used to find on their own. Reviewing the website alongside a trusted customer, he discovers why: the products ended up inside a section called "Solutions", under internal product line names no buyer knows, and the quote form grew to fourteen fields, including the company tax ID and an estimated budget. When the attached file is too large, the page shows an error and erases everything entered.
Before launch, nobody at the company tried to request a quote the way a customer would. The website was evaluated by how it looked, and the buyer evaluated it by what it let them do. UX design works in the gap between those two evaluations.
UX design organizes the visitor's journey through your website so they find what they are looking for and complete the action that matters to them, such as requesting a quote, with as little effort as possible.
A website approved for its looks can fail at the first task your buyer attempts
UX stands for "user experience". UX design is the discipline that plans how a person experiences using a website: what they find first, how they get their bearings, how much effort it takes to reach what they are looking for and what impression they are left with at the end. It works with structure, language, flows and testing with real people, and leaves aesthetic decisions for when the journey already works. UI design, which defines the look of each screen, usually appears alongside it; the difference between the two deserves its own article, so here we focus on the experience.
Earlier in this series we covered which sections a B2B website needs and what the first screen should show. UX design connects all of that from the visitor's point of view, because a well-written section adds little if the buyer never reaches it or does not understand what they find.
Visitor tasks: the unit by which experience is measured
UX design starts with a concrete question: what each visitor comes to do. On a B2B website, the tasks are similar from one industry to another: confirming that you manufacture the product or provide the service they need, checking a specification, verifying that you serve their industry and region, downloading information for the committee, finding whom to call and requesting a quote. Each task has a cost in clicks, reading time and doubts. Good design reduces that cost for the tasks that weigh most in your sale, and the proof that it succeeded is that visitors complete them without asking for help.
Five points of friction UX design removes before they cost your company a quote
Information architecture: where everything lives and what it is called
Information architecture decides how content is grouped and what each group is called. The most common mistake on B2B websites is organizing the menu according to the company's internal structure (divisions, in-house brands, product line names) while the buyer searches by application, material or problem. A simple technique to fix it is known as "card sorting": you ask a few customers to group and name cards with your products or services. The way they organize the information usually differs from your org chart, and it is the one worth reflecting in the menu.
Conversion flows: the steps between interest and request
A flow is the sequence of screens a visitor goes through to complete a task. UX design counts those steps and removes the unnecessary ones. If the buyer is on a product page, the quote button should open a form with that product already selected; if they land on an industry page, they should find the related case study and the contact option right there. Every time the visitor has to go back to the menu, copy a piece of information or repeat something they already entered, the flow loses some of the people who started it.
Forms that ask for what is necessary and forgive mistakes
The form is where interest becomes an opportunity, and also where the most visitors drop off. A well-designed form asks only for the information your team needs for the first contact, explains on the spot which field has an error and how to fix it, keeps what was entered when something fails and clearly confirms that the request was received. Asking for a tax ID, a budget or an annual volume before the first conversation filters out little and drives away a lot, especially the prospect who is still comparing suppliers.
Conventions and cognitive load: the visitor should not have to learn how to use your website
Jakob Nielsen, one of the leading figures in usability, summed up this principle in what is known as Jakob's Law: people spend most of their time on other websites and expect yours to work the same way. The logo leads to the home page, the menu is at the top, links stand out from the text and buttons look like buttons. Every time a website breaks those conventions for the sake of originality, it forces visitors to think about how to use it instead of thinking about your offer. That mental load is paid for in abandonment, especially with a buyer who reviews five suppliers in one afternoon.
Accessibility: a website that works for everyone on the committee
The committee evaluating a supplier brings together people of different ages, with different eyesight and in different conditions: the office, the production floor, the sun in a loading yard. The international web accessibility guidelines, known as WCAG, call for, among other things, a minimum contrast of 4.5 to 1 between normal text and its background, alternative text on images and forms that can be used with a keyboard. Meeting them helps any visitor read and use your website, and makes it easier for search engines and artificial intelligence assistants to interpret your content.
How UX design works before the first finished screen exists
Much of UX design happens before visual design, which is why it sometimes goes unnoticed in proposals. Its process has three stages.
Research: what your sales team and your data already know
Research gathers what the company already knows about its buyers. Your sales team knows the questions that come up on every call, the usual objections and the exact words customers use to describe their problem. Analytics from the current website show which pages people enter through, where they leave and what they type into the site search. Together with a few interviews with recent customers, that information defines the priority tasks and the language of the website.
Sitemap, wireframes and prototype: the journey before color
Research is used to build the sitemap and the "wireframes", gray-and-white layouts that show what goes on each screen and in what order, without the distraction of colors or photos. Next comes the prototype, a clickable version that lets you go through the main tasks before any code is written. Fixing the order of a menu or the number of fields in a form at this stage costs a fraction of what it costs once the website is live.
Usability testing: watching a person attempt the task
A usability test consists of asking a person with your buyer's profile to complete a task (finding a product, downloading a spec sheet, requesting a quote) while someone watches without helping. Nielsen maintains that about five people per round uncover most of the important problems, so the test fits into one afternoon. Watching a customer spend a minute searching for the button your team thought was obvious is more convincing than any opinion in the boardroom.
Signs that your website's experience is already costing your sales team opportunities
Experience problems rarely show up in a report under their own name. They appear as sales symptoms that are worth reading together:
Your sales reps answer questions by phone whose answers are already published on the website.
Many visitors open the quote page and few submit the form.
The site search records searches for products you do sell that the visitor could not find.
Heatmaps or session recordings show repeated clicks on elements that do not respond.
Long-standing customers email you asking for documents they used to download on their own.
When two or more of these signs appear, the next step is to watch three or four customers as they attempt the main tasks on your website. What you see in that session is usually enough to decide what to fix first.
At Artisma we work on experience starting with structure: we build the sitemap based on how your company sells and, before paying, you review a prototype to confirm the journey works. Each section guides the visitor toward a concrete decision, whether that is sending a WhatsApp message, leaving their email or booking an appointment, and analytics are active from launch. In the Contenido and Crecimiento plans we also apply one improvement per month based on the metrics report, because experience is refined through the behavior of real visitors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does UX design make a website project more expensive?
It is part of the process for any well-planned website: research, sitemap, prototype and testing. Its cost is lower than that of fixing a live website that does not convert later on, which usually ends in a redesign. When you review a proposal, ask which experience stages it includes and whether you will be able to go through a prototype before approving the visual design.
How long does it take to notice an experience improvement?
It depends on the website's traffic. On a B2B website with few daily visits, it is best to measure over several weeks and compare equivalent periods. Qualitative signals usually arrive sooner: fewer calls asking about the basics and more complete quote requests.
Can I improve the experience without redesigning the entire website?
Yes. Many improvements can be applied to the current website: renaming the menu, shortening the form, adding a quote button to every product or fixing the contrast. Start with the task that weighs most in your sale, almost always the quote request, and work through the rest in stages.
If your website was approved for how it looked and nobody has watched a customer try to request a quote on it, the journey probably has obstacles your team no longer sees. Request a diagnosis of your site at https://www.artismamkt.com and we will show you which tasks your buyer gets stuck on today and what we would change first so they reach the conversation with sales.