UX: what is it and why does it matter?

Posted on Jul 11, 2018

UX: what is it and why does it matter?

Why are we talking about UX?



Pay attention to the highlighted “Electoral vote” and “Popular vote” statistics. In the United States, the president wins by getting a majority of electoral college votes. Each of the 50 states has a number of electoral college votes and whichever candidate wins your state gets all of the electoral college votes from your state. The election that year came down to the state of Florida and its electoral college votes. George Bush won the state by 537 votes out of almost six million votes. Crazy!

It gets even more interesting. Here is what a ballot looked like in a county in Florida that year:

If you were voting for George Bush, which button would you press? The answer is the button marked with an A. Easy.

What would you press if you were voting for Al Gore? Well, he is second on the list so you would press the second button labeled B. Wrong. Pressing B would send your vote to the Reform candidate Pat Buchanan. If you wanted to vote for Gore, you would need to press the button labeled C. If you are confused, so were many voters in Florida.

The small margin of victory and this confusing ballot lead to a recount of votes and a U.S Supreme Court decision.

This is a clear example of poor UX. The design choices for the ballot lead to confusion and error and impacted the result of a U.S election.

Why does any of this matter for SEO? Let’s talk about it.

How does this matter for SEO?  

In one phrase: Machine Learning.




Is UX hard to measure? It sure is. We at Distilled have been talking about this for years.



You are not hit by any manual penalty



Whether or not you are designing a ballot for a presidential election or making a site to sell t-shirts, UX matters.

Ok, UX is important. I get that. I still don’t know what it is and what I can do?


What is UX?


UX is composed of seven key factors:






















Thanks for taking the time to read. If you have any thoughts or questions feel free to reach out to me in the comments below or via the Distilled Twitter account.