Top Tasks in UX: How to Identify What Really Matters to Your Users

Definition of a website footer

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The footer of a website sits at the very bottom of every single web page and contains links to various types of content on your website. It’s an often overlooked component of a website, but it plays several important roles in your information architecture (IA) – it’s not just some extra thing that gets plonked at the bottom of every page.

Getting your website footer right matters!

The footer communicates to your website visitors that they’ve reached the bottom of the page and it’s also a great place to position important content links that don’t belong anywhere else – within reason. A website footer is not a dumping ground for random content links that you couldn’t find a home for, however there are some content types that are conventionally accessed via the footer e.g., privacy policies and copyright information just to name a few.

Lastly, from a usability and navigation perspective, website footers can serve as a bit of a safety net for lost website visitors. Users might be scrolling and scrolling trying to find something and the footer might be what catches them and guides them back to safety before they give up on your website and go elsewhere. Footers are a functional and important part of your overall IA, but also have their own architecture too.

Read on to learn about the types of content links that might be found in a footer, see some real life examples and discuss some approaches that you might take when testing your footer to ensure that your website is supporting your visitors from top to bottom.

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What belongs in a website footer

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Deciding which content links belong in your footer depends entirely on your website. The type of footer, its intent and content depends on its audience of your customers, potential customers and more — ie your website visitors. Every website is different, but here’s a list of links to content types that might typically be found in a footer.

• Legal content that may include: Copyright information, disclaimer, privacy policy, terms or use or terms of service – always seek appropriate advice on legal content and where to place it!
• Your site map
• Contact details including social media links and live chat or chat bot access
• Customer service content that may include: shipping and delivery details, order tracking, returns, size guides, pricing if you’re a service and product recall information.
• Website accessibility details and ways to provide feedback 
• ‘About Us’ type content that may include: company history, team or leadership team details, the careers page and more 
• Key navigational links that also appear in the main navigation menu that is presented to website visitors when they first land on the page (e.g. at the top or the side)

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Website footer examples

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Let’s take a look at three diverse real life examples of website footers.

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IKEA US
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IKEA’s US website has an interesting double barrelled footer that is also large and complex – a ‘fat footer’ as it’s often called – and its structure changes as you travel deeper into the IA. The below image taken from the IKEA US home page shows two clear blocks of text separated by a blue horizontal line. Above the line we have the heading of ‘All Departments’ with four columns showing product categories and below the line there are seven clear groups of content links covering a broad range of topics including customer service information, links that appear in the top navigation menu and careers. At the very bottom of the footer there are social media links and the copyright information for the website.
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As expected, IKEA’s overall website IA is quite large, and as a website visitor clicks deeper into the IA, the footer starts to change. On the product category landing pages, the footer is mostly the same but with a new addition of some handy breadcrumbs to aid navigation (see below image).
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When a website visitor travels all the way down to the individual product page level, the footer changes again. In the below image found on the product page for a bath mat, while the blue line and everything below it is still there, the ‘All Departments’ section of the footer has been removed and replaced with non-clickable text on the left hand side that reads as ‘More Bath mats’ and a link on the right hand side that says ‘Go to Bath mats’. Clicking on that link takes the website visitor back to the page above.
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Overall, evolving the footer content as the website visitor progresses deeper into the IA is an interesting approach - as the main page content becomes more focussed as does the footer while still maintaining multiple supportive safety net features.

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M.A.C Cosmetics US
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The footer for the US website of this well known cosmetics brand has a four part footer. At first it appears to just have three parts as shown in the image below: a wide section with seven content link categories covering a broad range of content types as the main part with a narrow black strip on either end of it making up the second and third parts. The strip above has loyalty program and live chat links and the strip below contains mostly links to legal content.
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When a website visitor hovers over the ‘Join our loyalty program’ call to action (CTA) in that top narrow strip, the hidden fourth part of the footer which is slightly translucent pulls up like a drawer and sits directly above the strip capping off the top of the main section (as shown in the below image). This section contains more information about the loyalty program and contains further CTAs to join or sign in. It disappears when the cursor is moved away from the hover CTA or it can be collapsed manually via the arrow in the top right hand corner of this fourth part. It’s an interesting and unexpected interaction to have with a footer, but it adds to the overall consistent and cohesive experience of this website because it feels like the footer is an active participant in that experience.
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Domino’s Pizza US
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Domino’s Pizza’s US website has a reasonably flat footer in terms of architecture but it occupies as much space as a more complex or deeper footer. As shown in the image below, its content links are presented horizontally over three rows on the left hand side of the footer and these links are visually separated by forward slashes. It also displays social media links and some advertising content on the right hand side. The most interesting feature of this footer is the large paragraph of text titled ‘Legal Stuff’ below the links. Delightfully it uses direct, clear and plain language and even includes a note about delivery charges not including tips and to ‘Please reward your driver for awesomeness’.
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How to test a website footer

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Like every other part of your website, the only way you’re going to know if your footer is supporting your website visitors is if you test it with them. When testing a website’s IA overall, the footer is often excluded. This might be because we want to focus on other areas first or maybe it’s because testing everything at once has the potential to be overwhelming for our research participants.
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Testing a footer is fairly easy thing to do and there’s no right or wrong approach – it really does depend on where you are up to in your project, the resources you have available to you and the size and complexity of the footer itself!
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If you’re designing a footer for a new website there’s a few ways you might approach ensuring your footer is best supporting your website visitors. If you’re planning to include a large and complex footer, it’s a good idea to start by running an open card sort just on those footer links. An open card sort will help you understand how your website visitors expect those content links in your footer to be grouped and what they think those groups should be called.
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If you’re redesigning an existing website, you might first run a tree test on the existing footer to benchmark test it and to pinpoint the exact issues. You might tree test just the footer in the study or you might test the whole website including the footer. Optimal's tree testing is really flexible and you can tree test just a small section of an IA or you can do the whole thing in one go to find out where people are getting lost in the structure. Your approach will depend on your project and what you already know so far. If you suspect there may be issues with the website’s footer, for example, if no one is visiting it and/or you’ve been receiving customer service requests from visitors to help them find content that only lives in the footer,  it would be a good idea to consider isolating it for testing. This will help you avoid any competition between the footer and the rest of your IA as well as any potential confusion that may arise from duplicated tree branches (i.e. when your footer contains duplicate labels).
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If you’re short on time and there aren’t any known issues with the footer prior to a redesign, you might tree test the entire IA in your benchmark study, iterate your design and then along with everything else, include testing activities for your footer in your moderated usability testing plan. You might include a usability testing scenario or question that requires your participants to complete a task that involves finding content that can only be found in the footer (e.g., shipping information if it’s an ecommerce website). Also keep a close eye on how your participants are moving around the page in general and see if/when the footer comes into play – is it helping people when they’re lost and scrolling? Or is it going unnoticed? If so, why and so on. Talk to your research participants like you would about any other aspect of your website to find out what’s going on there. When resources are tight, use your best judgement and choose the research approach that’s best for your situation, we’ve all had moments where we’ve had to be pragmatic and do our best with what we have.
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When you’re at a stage in your design process where you have a visual design or concept for your footer, you could also run a first-click test. First-click tests are quick and easy and will help you determine how your website visitors are faring once they reach your footer and if they can identify the correct content link to complete their task. Studies can be run remotely or in person and just like the rest of the tools in Optimal's user research platform, are super quick to run and great for reaching website visitors all over the world simply by sharing a link to the study.

In UX research we are told again and again that to ensure truly user-centered design, it’s important to test ideas with real users as early as possible. There are many benefits that come from introducing the voice of the people you are designing for in the early stages of the design process. The more feedback you have to work with, the more you can inform your design to align with real needs and expectations. In turn, this leads to better experiences that are more likely to succeed in the real world.It is not surprising then that paper prototypes have become a popular tool used among researchers. They allow ideas to be tested as they emerge, and can inform initial designs before putting in the hard yards of building the real thing. It would seem that they’re almost a no-brainer for researchers, but just like anything out there, along with all the praise, they have also received a fair share of criticism, so let’s explore paper prototypes a little further.

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What’s a paper prototype anyway? 🧐📖

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Paper prototyping is a simple usability testing technique designed to test interfaces quickly and cheaply. A paper prototype is nothing more than a visual representation of what an interface could look like on a piece of paper (or even a whiteboard or chalkboard). Unlike high-fidelity prototypes that allow for digital interactions to take place, paper prototypes are considered to be low-fidelity, in that they don’t allow direct user interaction. They can also range in sophistication, from a simple sketch using a pen and paper to simulate an interface, through to using designing or publishing software to create a more polished experience with additional visual elements.

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Showing a research participant a paper prototype is far from the real deal, but it can provide useful insights into how users may expect to interact with specific features and what makes sense to them from a basic, user-centered perspective. There are some mixed attitudes towards paper prototypes among the UX community, so before we make any distinct judgements, let's weigh up their pros and cons.

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Advantages 🏆

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• They’re cheap and fastPen and paper, a basic word document, Photoshop. With a paper prototype, you can take an idea and transform it into a low-fidelity (but workable) testing solution very quickly, without having to write code or use sophisticated tools. This is especially beneficial to researchers who work with tight budgets, and don’t have the time or resources to design an elaborate user testing plan.
• Anyone can do itPaper prototypes allow you to test designs without having to involve multiple roles in building them. Developers can take a back seat as you test initial ideas, before any code work begins.
• They encourage creativityFrom both the product teams participating in their design, but also from the users. They require the user to employ their imagination, and give them the opportunity express their thoughts and ideas on what improvements can be made. Because they look unfinished, they naturally invite constructive criticism and feedback.
• They help minimize your chances of failurePaper prototypes and user-centered design go hand in hand. Introducing real people into your design as early as possible can help verify whether you are on the right track, and generate feedback that may give you a good idea of whether your idea is likely to succeed or not.

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Disadvantages 😬

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• They’re not as polished as interactive prototypesIf executed poorly, paper prototypes can appear unprofessional and haphazard. They lack the richness of an interactive experience, and if our users are not well informed when coming in for a testing session, they may be surprised to be testing digital experiences on pieces of paper.
• The interaction is limitedDigital experiences can contain animations and interactions that can’t be replicated on paper. It can be difficult for a user to fully understand an interface when these elements are absent, and of course, the closer the interaction mimics the final product, the more reliable our findings will be.
• They require facilitationWith an interactive prototype you can assign your user tasks to complete and observe how they interact with the interface. Paper prototypes, however, require continuous guidance from a moderator in communicating next steps and ensuring participants understand the task at hand.
• Their results have to be interpreted carefullyPaper prototypes can’t emulate the final experience entirely. It is important to interpret their findings while keeping their limitations in mind. Although they can help minimize your chances of failure, they can’t guarantee that your final product will be a success. There are factors that determine success that cannot be captured on a piece of paper, and positive feedback at the prototyping stage does not necessarily equate to a well-received product further down the track.

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Improving the interface of card sorting, one prototype at a time 💡

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We recently embarked on a research project looking at the user interface of our card-sorting tool, OptimalSort. Our research has two main objectives — first of all to benchmark the current experience on laptops and tablets and identify ways in which we can improve the current interface. The second objective is to look at how we can improve the experience of card sorting on a mobile phone.

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Rather than replicating the desktop experience on a smaller screen, we want to create an intuitive experience for mobiles, ensuring we maintain the quality of data collected across devices.Our current mobile experience is a scaled down version of the desktop and still has room for improvement, but despite that, 9 per cent of our users utilize the app. We decided to start from the ground up and test an entirely new design using paper prototypes. In the spirit of testing early and often, we decided to jump right into testing sessions with real users. In our first testing sprint, we asked participants to take part in two tasks. The first was to perform an open or closed card sort on a laptop or tablet. The second task involved using paper prototypes to see how people would respond to the same experience on a mobile phone.

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Context is everything 🎯

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What did we find? In the context of our research project, paper prototypes worked remarkably well. We were somewhat apprehensive at first, trying to figure out the exact flow of the experience and whether the people coming into our office would get it. As it turns out, people are clever, and even those with limited experience using a smartphone were able to navigate and identify areas for improvement just as easily as anyone else. Some participants even said they prefered the experience of testing paper prototypes over a laptop. In an effort to make our prototype-based tasks easy to understand and easy to explain to our participants, we reduced the full card sort to a few key interactions, minimizing the number of branches in the UI flow.

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This could explain a preference for the mobile task, where we only asked participants to sort through a handful of cards, as opposed to a whole set.The main thing we found was that no matter how well you plan your test, paper prototypes require you to be flexible in adapting the flow of your session to however your user responds. We accepted that deviating from our original plan was something we had to embrace, and in the end these additional conversations with our participants helped us generate insights above and beyond the basics we aimed to address. We now have a whole range of feedback that we can utilize in making more sophisticated, interactive prototypes.

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Whether our success with using paper prototypes was determined by the specific setup of our testing sessions, or simply by their pure usefulness as a research technique is hard to tell. By first performing a card sorting task on a laptop or tablet, our participants approached the paper prototype with an understanding of what exactly a card sort required. Therefore there is no guarantee that we would have achieved the same level of success in testing paper prototypes on their own. What this does demonstrate, however, is that paper prototyping is heavily dependent on the context of your assessment.

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Final thoughts 💬

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Paper prototypes are not guaranteed to work for everybody. If you’re designing an entirely new experience and trying to describe something complex in an abstracted form on paper, people may struggle to comprehend your idea. Even a careful explanation doesn’t guarantee that it will be fully understood by the user. Should this stop you from testing out the usefulness of paper prototypes in the context of your project? Absolutely not.

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In a perfect world we’d test high fidelity interactive prototypes that resemble the real deal as closely as possible, every step of the way. However, if we look at testing from a practical perspective, before we can fully test sophisticated designs, paper prototypes provide a great solution for generating initial feedback.In his article criticizing the use of paper prototypes, Jake Knapp makes the point that when we show customers a paper prototype we’re inviting feedback, not reactions. What we found in our research however, was quite the opposite.

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In our sessions, participants voiced their expectations and understanding of what actions were possible at each stage, without us having to probe specifically for feedback. Sure we also received general comments on icon or colour preferences, but for the most part our users gave us insights into what they felt throughout the experience, in addition to what they thought.

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Further reading 🧠

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• Why You Only Need To Test With 5 Users - Nielsen Norman Group’s Jakob Nielsen explains reveals his thoughts on only using five users when conducting usability testing.
• Sketching for better mobile experiences - Lennart Hennigs explains how to sketch and why you should do it in an article for Smashing Magazine.
• Paper prototypes work as well as software prototypes -  Bob Bailey explains why he thinks paper prototypes are just as good as software prototypes for usability testing.

‍Was human-centered design all wrong?

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No, but it fails to capture the whole picture.

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Don Norman introduced human-centered design (HCD), the approach of putting people and their needs at the center of the design process, in the 1980s and almost 50 years later at DDX San Diego 2026, he challenged the philosophy.

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Human-centered design gave the industry an important shift in perspective, paying close attention to the people who would actually live with what we create, but there’s tension. Design can create tremendous value for people while also creating unintended consequences for cultures, communities, organizations, and the world around them.

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If we optimize for the person in front of us, what happens to everyone and everything outside the frame?

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And as technology becomes increasingly agentic, that broader view becomes even more relevant. We're no longer designing only things that people interact with. We're increasingly designing systems that can act, make decisions, and influence what happens next.

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Summary

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Emerging design philosophies

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Life-Centered Design (LCD) expands the focus from the individual user to the larger living system that the product or service exists within. It seeks to align design decisions with global goals such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

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Intelligence-Centered Design (ICD) and Human-Agent Centered Design (H-ACD) are extensions of HCD where AI plays an active role in the design process alongside human intelligence, each learning from, making decisions, and mediating the process.

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Agent-Centered Design (ACD) puts AI agents at the center as the primary participant in the process, agents building for agents.

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Key elements of design and innovation in an agentic world

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Start with the people, not the product

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Good experiences have always started with deep understanding of the people who use the product, service, or system. Needs, expectations, and priorities are shaped by environment, so what works in one market, organization, or culture can't automatically be treated as a universal truth for all.

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That's why ethnography and other forms of contextual research remain so valuable. Before asking what we should build, we need to understand the world people are navigating.

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Questions to ask:

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• Who are we really designing for?
• What assumptions are we bringing from our own environment?
• What would happen if this design enters a different context?
• What are users' stated choices and how does that differ from their actual behavior?

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The discipline of understanding people hasn't gone anywhere. It's just being asked to stretch further, to the systems, risks, and impacts beyond individuals.

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Design for the system around the human

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Behavior is shaped by systems, organizational structures, constraints, and the decisions made around you, so those factors are part of what we are designing for. Agentic AI makes this deep understanding of context even more important.

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When AI can act, make decisions, and influence what happens next, it becomes a key part of the system. Therefore, design has to account for the relationship between humans and their agents including how they work together, what artifacts are created along the way, how do they communicate, what decisions does AI make and what are its responsibilities.

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Questions to ask:

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• What happens outside the immediate experience?
• How might the system change over time?
• How do decisions get made? What's the logic behind them?

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One practical takeaway is to spend more time understanding what people actually do, not just what they say they do. Diary studies, observation, prototype testing, and live site testing can all help surface what people may not be able to articulate themselves. Rather than simply asking “why,” ask, “What drove you to make that decision?” This is an open question to prompt an honest explanation of what influenced their thinking and led them to take a certain action.

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Do more "design doing"

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Design has no shortage of frameworks, methodologies, books, and white papers. While these give us useful ways to think, real change only happens when teams transform what they’ve learned into something tangible. In the end, impact isn't measured by the depth of your knowledge, but by what you actually create with it.

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Question to ask: What's the smallest thing I could do to build or test this idea this week?

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A simple prototype will reveal insights that hours of discussion never could. A real interaction exposes the hidden gaps between what people say and what they actually do. A quick experiment tells a team far more than another round of debate.

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At its best, good design thinking must always lead to good "design doing."

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Earn influence by translating value into the language of the business

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Research and design often sits in the middle of an organization. Leadership sets direction, research gathers insight, design shapes the experience, then implementation follows. When each function speaks a different language, intent can get lost along the way.

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Designers and researchers are inherently connectors. We bring together different perspectives, make sense of complexity, and help people see how decisions affect one another. But we aren't often in the room when the decisions themselves are being made. Policy, process, business models, and organizational structures are all forms of design, yet designers are often brought in after those choices have already been made.

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There is an opportunity and a need for design thinking and "design doing" to move further upstream, and that starts with speaking the language of the people making those decisions: finances and margins.

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Questions to ask:

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• What does this insight or design mean for productivity, adoption, risk, growth, for the people working inside the system and for the people affected by it?
• What would this save, generate, or protect, in dollars, time, or risk?
• Can we connect the human story to a number?
• How can I socialize this upwards in my organization?

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Business decisions are design decisions.

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Designing for what comes next

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The next era of design is expanding what we consider when we design.

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As systems become more autonomous, designers have an opportunity to shape not only experiences, but the policies, services, and the systems around them.

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The future of design is less about finding the right framework and more about what we choose to do with what we know.

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