I’M NOT sure whether Tim Berners-Lee could have imagined just how vast the internet would become when he first came up with the concept for a worldwide web 20 years ago.

The original idea was simple – to create a pool of human knowledge allowing people around the world to share their ideas on common projects.

These days the internet is much more than that. Of course it’s still that pool of human knowledge, but it’s also a place to play, to entertain and be entertained, to engage and interact, to explore, to learn, even to shop and share stories.

It’s estimated there are now over 150 million websites worldwide competing for our attention. For some this will be music to their ears. For others it may seem like a nightmare, but as a nation we’re spending more and more time online, and we’re demanding much more from the sites we visit.

For content providers this means it’s no longer enough to simply provide content and expect users to be happy with that alone. We’re increasingly expected to provide added value in the form of richer media content.

User experience (UX) design tries to address the needs of users by ensuring they not only find what they are looking for, but enjoy the online experience in the process.

This means an entirely different approach to the way we have traditionally handled designing websites. When I first started working in web design in the late 90s, most organisations offered little more than an online version of a corporate brochure, often reusing the existing content. More recently, “search” has become an influencer in the design process, many organisations developing sites to appeal to search engines rather than users.

User experience (UX) design, however, is all about seeing things in a slightly different way, looking from the user’s point of view, it’s as much a mindset as a design principle.

This UX approach often includes researching user behaviour, identifying and profiling different consumer groups, creating personas and modelling possible journeys that users may make across the site, so they have the best experience.

Whichever approach you take to web design, if you can make it easier for your customers to find what they want and send them away with a smile then they are likely to come back again and again.