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What is UX Design?
The main notion of user experience designs is that various users with different mindsets use interface(s) to achieve a goal. User Experience Design is a combination of 'How is the User Interface(UI) looking' and 'How does it function'.
UX designs plays part at the beginning of software development process. There are various UX design tools including but not limited to User Research, Personas, Content Strategy, Wireframes, Information Architecture(IA), Prototypes, Usability Testing etc.
Understanding Users:
The first step of user experience design is finding your users and gathering their requirements. A user experience designer needs to talk to people, understand their goals, have empathy for them. There is a subtle difference between what real user desires and what client (or customer) wants. A user experience designer needs to be able to differentiate user's goals from client's (or customer's) goals. For instance, users (or readers) of an educational blog may have their goal as gaining more knowledge whereas the goal of this blog posting company (i.e. clients) could be to get more registrations from its readers. 'Keeping it simple' is the key to find out what the user wants to do. By having empathy for the users, we can find out what is wrong and fix it so that user's life is made simple.
User Research:
In order to be able to separate the goals of users v/s the goals of clients, user research is required. This involves talking to real people and is important because the clients may have wrong assumptions about what their users wants. A user experience designer needs to ask open ended questions to find out what does the users really want. There are various tools which can be used for user research such as Online forms, surveys, screeners, recruiting firms etc.
After the above steps of knowing the users and understanding their needs are done, there are three important deliverables of a UX design process : Personas, Scenarios and User Flows.
Personas:
Biographies of fictional users or characters are called Personas. Personas serve as springboard for designers. Personas help the design team by giving them a more intuitive understanding of their prospective users or customers. Below is an example of a typical persona used by UX designers:
Scenarios:
Scenarios are a brief description; like plot of a movie; that demonstrates what all things a user may want to do to complete a certain activity or task. Scenarios are a collection of word documents or paragraphs of texts. A user experience designer needs to combine different personas with different scenarios. This helps a UX designer think of stories about what user needs. The major requirements of users are the outcomes when a user experience designer brainstorms these stories. Below is an example of a story:
User Flows:
User Flows are the next logical step in a typical user experience design project. User flows guide us to understand what path a user takes to accomplish a certain task. User flows also tell us about the steps or decisions a user takes in order to finish the task while he or she is traversing the chosen path.
Wireframes:
Wireframes act as sketches of what a user experience designer thinks of a product after all the previous steps. Wireframes can be prepared for web pages of a web application or for screens in a mobile app to tell the clients about the ideas inside a UX designer's head. These are the first deliverables to the clients. Wireframes describes what are the inputs for a web page or a mobile screen, how important are these inputs and describe the goal of that page. If we can put the stages a UX process goes through into four parts; viz.; Learn, Design, Build and Test then wireframes will fall at first stage; i.e.; Learning. Wireframes are fast and cheap. Depending on the budget, time availability and complexity of the project we can choose a style using which the wireframes are created from Low Fidelity or High Fidelity. Low Fidelity wireframes are good for playing around creative ideas or concepts and are easy to make changes in. High Fidelity wireframes are more detailed but are easy to understand for the clients. High Fidelity wireframes give more insights about contents, typography, graphics and layouts but take more time to make. Below is an example of how a typical wireframe looks like:
Prototypes:
Prototypes are like various pages or screens connected together to give a glimpse of how a finished application would function. In simple words, prototypes are clickable wireframes. Prototypes can be used for exploring ideations but they take more time to market. Prototypes can work as POCs. Obviously, prototypes are costlier to prepare as compared to wireframes. A user experience designer should concentrate only on limited (or important) flows and not the end-to-end functionality while creating prototypes.
Information Architecture(IA):
Information Architecture is architecting the scheme under which your website falls into. It deals with how to arrange content on a website or app. A UX designer needs to come up with ideas regarding logical navigation bars, sub-menus, site map etc. We can take users help to decide how they want their website to look or what should be the primitive menu options or which are the user's favourite parts while on the website. A UX designer can also use the personas created earlier or ask a real person or use techniques like card sorting which will help creating the IA simpler.
Design Patterns:
Design patterns are the commonly used options for the way an interaction is often handled like a calendar pop-up, press of a form button or hyperlinks. A typical UX designer can get hugely benefitted by making use of design patterns while working on a design project because these are proven and tested options used by many others.
Analytics:
Analytics refers to finding meaningful insights in a website or an app to better understand its users and their common behaviors. Analytics, if used correctly, can tell us many useful details about the users and what they are doing with a product. We can find out how much time users are spending on a page, the bounce rate, the referrals from where the users are visiting our website and many more pieces of information by using Analytics.
Usability Test:
A usability test is a face-to-face discussion between a designer and a user who tries to use a product. A UX designer interviews the user while he or she is using the application. The user answers questions while performing the task given by the UX designer and designer takes notes.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, an effective UX design process is iterative in nature. It involves researching the problem, constructing a solution, testing the result and repeating the process.
Here is a great e-book available on amazon:
The main notion of user experience designs is that various users with different mindsets use interface(s) to achieve a goal. User Experience Design is a combination of 'How is the User Interface(UI) looking' and 'How does it function'.
UX designs plays part at the beginning of software development process. There are various UX design tools including but not limited to User Research, Personas, Content Strategy, Wireframes, Information Architecture(IA), Prototypes, Usability Testing etc.
Understanding Users:
The first step of user experience design is finding your users and gathering their requirements. A user experience designer needs to talk to people, understand their goals, have empathy for them. There is a subtle difference between what real user desires and what client (or customer) wants. A user experience designer needs to be able to differentiate user's goals from client's (or customer's) goals. For instance, users (or readers) of an educational blog may have their goal as gaining more knowledge whereas the goal of this blog posting company (i.e. clients) could be to get more registrations from its readers. 'Keeping it simple' is the key to find out what the user wants to do. By having empathy for the users, we can find out what is wrong and fix it so that user's life is made simple.
User Research:
In order to be able to separate the goals of users v/s the goals of clients, user research is required. This involves talking to real people and is important because the clients may have wrong assumptions about what their users wants. A user experience designer needs to ask open ended questions to find out what does the users really want. There are various tools which can be used for user research such as Online forms, surveys, screeners, recruiting firms etc.
After the above steps of knowing the users and understanding their needs are done, there are three important deliverables of a UX design process : Personas, Scenarios and User Flows.
Personas:
Biographies of fictional users or characters are called Personas. Personas serve as springboard for designers. Personas help the design team by giving them a more intuitive understanding of their prospective users or customers. Below is an example of a typical persona used by UX designers:
Scenarios:
Scenarios are a brief description; like plot of a movie; that demonstrates what all things a user may want to do to complete a certain activity or task. Scenarios are a collection of word documents or paragraphs of texts. A user experience designer needs to combine different personas with different scenarios. This helps a UX designer think of stories about what user needs. The major requirements of users are the outcomes when a user experience designer brainstorms these stories. Below is an example of a story:
User Flows:
User Flows are the next logical step in a typical user experience design project. User flows guide us to understand what path a user takes to accomplish a certain task. User flows also tell us about the steps or decisions a user takes in order to finish the task while he or she is traversing the chosen path.
Wireframes:
Wireframes act as sketches of what a user experience designer thinks of a product after all the previous steps. Wireframes can be prepared for web pages of a web application or for screens in a mobile app to tell the clients about the ideas inside a UX designer's head. These are the first deliverables to the clients. Wireframes describes what are the inputs for a web page or a mobile screen, how important are these inputs and describe the goal of that page. If we can put the stages a UX process goes through into four parts; viz.; Learn, Design, Build and Test then wireframes will fall at first stage; i.e.; Learning. Wireframes are fast and cheap. Depending on the budget, time availability and complexity of the project we can choose a style using which the wireframes are created from Low Fidelity or High Fidelity. Low Fidelity wireframes are good for playing around creative ideas or concepts and are easy to make changes in. High Fidelity wireframes are more detailed but are easy to understand for the clients. High Fidelity wireframes give more insights about contents, typography, graphics and layouts but take more time to make. Below is an example of how a typical wireframe looks like:
Prototypes:
Prototypes are like various pages or screens connected together to give a glimpse of how a finished application would function. In simple words, prototypes are clickable wireframes. Prototypes can be used for exploring ideations but they take more time to market. Prototypes can work as POCs. Obviously, prototypes are costlier to prepare as compared to wireframes. A user experience designer should concentrate only on limited (or important) flows and not the end-to-end functionality while creating prototypes.
Information Architecture(IA):
Information Architecture is architecting the scheme under which your website falls into. It deals with how to arrange content on a website or app. A UX designer needs to come up with ideas regarding logical navigation bars, sub-menus, site map etc. We can take users help to decide how they want their website to look or what should be the primitive menu options or which are the user's favourite parts while on the website. A UX designer can also use the personas created earlier or ask a real person or use techniques like card sorting which will help creating the IA simpler.
Design Patterns:
Design patterns are the commonly used options for the way an interaction is often handled like a calendar pop-up, press of a form button or hyperlinks. A typical UX designer can get hugely benefitted by making use of design patterns while working on a design project because these are proven and tested options used by many others.
Analytics:
Analytics refers to finding meaningful insights in a website or an app to better understand its users and their common behaviors. Analytics, if used correctly, can tell us many useful details about the users and what they are doing with a product. We can find out how much time users are spending on a page, the bounce rate, the referrals from where the users are visiting our website and many more pieces of information by using Analytics.
Usability Test:
A usability test is a face-to-face discussion between a designer and a user who tries to use a product. A UX designer interviews the user while he or she is using the application. The user answers questions while performing the task given by the UX designer and designer takes notes.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, an effective UX design process is iterative in nature. It involves researching the problem, constructing a solution, testing the result and repeating the process.
Here is a great e-book available on amazon:
Very informative blog... Here I found good information on user experience and customer experience. User experience analytics help to understand user behavior. Thanks
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Thanks a lot for your appreciation!
DeleteDo let me know what else you would like to read about.
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