Andrew Badham 2018-04-23 12:28:16
On a superficial level, User Experience Design is a fairly self-explanatory function. A UX Designer is primarily concerned with how the user interacts with a product. What that product is, varies; it could be a web, mobile or desktop app, or even a physical product. Regardless, someone has to take into account how the user will eventually use the product and whether that design actually fits their usage. That’s all fairly intuitive from the title; what’s less intuitive is how UX designers specifically go about their work. Naturally, there will be some key differences depending on the type of product, but here are some standard principles these folk apply.
Five Ws and an H
If you can still remember high school, you might remember this principle; it stands for who, what, where, when, why and how. It’s extremely simple but surprisingly effective in prompting a designer to think holistically about their customer’s experience:
- Who is using this product?
- What are they using it for?
- Where are they using it?
- When/how often are they using it?
- How would they use it?
You’ll notice we don’t say, “what do you think they’re doing?” We say, “what are they doing?” In other words, good UX design should be built around data and measurement as opposed to guess work. We don’t want to assume how a user will approach the product, we want to know. Which leads us to another popular practice in the field of UX design.
Build, Measure, Learn
If you’ve read any Lean start-up methodology, there is a strong chance you’ve heard of this concept by Eric Ries. Simply put, it’s an attempt to apply scientific thinking to your designs. Science and design may seem antithetical, but in this case, they are an integral combination of ideas. We start with a hypothesis of what we have researched will work, then we build.
Building is actually making your product. At first, that may be your MVP(minimum viable product), in simpler terms, the most basic version of your product which can be sold. We don’t want too much complication before we start testing the user experience.
Measuring is observing how your customer interacts with the product. There are many tools for this like built-in analytics, heat maps or even a basic survey. The more measurements you can take the more likely you are to interpret the data accurately.
Learning is taking that interpretation and understanding it. What worked and what should we keep? What failed and what should we change? This is where we bridge the divide between what we expected versus what actually happened. And once we learn, we start the process again.
Wireframes
Lastly, if you’re going to get into UX Design, you’re going to want to look into wireframing. Before you build anything, you need a prototype; before you build a prototype, you need a wireframe. A wireframe is a skeleton design that describes the user’s journey through the product. This can even be a simple sketch to begin with.
Why UX
We’ve talked about what UX design is, but not a lot about why we need it. The straightforward answer is, users have a variety of products they can choose. And while functionality is a huge concern, so is usability. If customers find your product confusing or unintuitive, they’re going to drop it and fast. So let UX designers bridge the gap between the engineers and the end user. That way you have a product that works well and fits the end user.