User experience (UX) design is the process of designing a website or digital product to provide a seamless, efficient, and enjoyable experience for users. It encompasses usability, accessibility, and interaction design, ensuring that visitors can easily navigate, find information, and complete desired actions (e.g., making a purchase or signing up). In this article, we will go through some of the most important definitions of UX design that will surely help you boost your website.
The Exact Definition of UX Design
UX stands for user experience, and Wikipedia defines design as planning the construction of an object activity or process. basically how something looks and works! So UX design, or user experience design, is to plan how something looks and works to make the activity of using it easy and enjoyable.
UX design is the process of creating a seamless experience throughout the entire user journey. The term user experience itself was first used in 1993 by Don Norman, an expert in cognitive science. He came up with the term while working for Apple. At first, his main purpose was to boost the industrial design of Apple’s products by enabling users to set up and use computers easily. But ux design also applies to physical interactions and non-digital objects. meaning it exists in every aspect of our lives, from the lighting used in a restaurant to the checkout process in an e-commerce shop. Today, we’ll talk about ux design for digital products such as websites, apps, and software.
The Key Factors of UX Design
There are three main factors in UX design:
First, it must meet the user’s needs. It must also be easy to use and easy to learn, and it must give the user control and freedom. and as an added bonus, it should also surprise and delight!
- The first factor is meeting the user’s needs. This means that whatever the user came to do using your product or service, you must make sure that they’re able to achieve that outcome. As an example, in an online food delivery service, the user has come to get food delivered within a certain time. Simply put, this first factor means that you deliver on those needs, and the person gets the food on time to their house.
- The second factor is that your product or service is easy to use and easy to learn. Going back to the food delivery example, this means that you would find it easy to browse and find the food you want, put in your address, specify the time, and complete the order! The easy part means that even if you’ve never used this service before, you know exactly what to do, and it’s just as easy as though you’ve done it 100 times!
- The third factor is that the user should always have control and freedom in the process. In the food delivery example, this means that they could change their mind about the food or even cancel or reschedule during the process.
- The added bonus factor, number four, is surprise and delight. In the food delivery example, this might mean getting a free voucher for your next order or that the delivery person greets you with a warm smile and a thank you for using their service, something that really makes you feel special and want to use that product again.
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The Core of UX Design
The core of UX design is that it’s all about the user! Products that don’t have good UX design aren’t taking the user’s needs into consideration. Taking into account the users’ needs and motivations and giving them a great user experience leads to more exciting and valuable products and services. The reason why businesses all over the world are starting to realize the value of UX design is that when you give users a good experience, they’re more likely to share and come back and use your service again and again.
What are the factors for good UX design?
We’ve been talking about good UX design and bad UX design. But what does that really look like in the real world?
To put this in a context we’re all familiar with:
Think about microwaves. When was the last time you were at someone else’s house and tried to use their microwave and couldn’t quite figure out exactly what you needed to do? Think about all the different ways you can interact with microwaves. There are buttons and dials and knobs and digital screens, and it can be hard to figure out how to achieve the simple task of heating food. when you don’t know exactly how to use the device that’s in front of you! This is what we’re talking about when we say bad UX design.
Conversely, let’s look at an example of good UX design. Take the humble toaster; its simple function is to heat bread into toast just the way you like it. Making toast is a really simple activity, but it can be an imperfect eye. When the bread isn’t toasted quite enough, you usually need to guess how long to put it back in for. This is where great UX design comes in, where the UX designer has understood the frustrations and needs of the user and invented a button called just a bit more! This removes the element of guesswork for the user and creates a delightfully successful experience.
Don Norman is one of the founding figures of UX design, and he also shares a great example of good versus bad UX design indoors. Think of how many times you’ve tried to open a door only to realize you are pushing or pulling in the wrong direction. Most people blame themselves when this happens. thinking that they should have known which way to push or pull the door. But UX design tells us that this isn’t the user’s fault; It’s the fault of the person who designed the door. If a door has a handle that you can grab, it’s telling the user that it’s meant to be pulled. But what we find is that some doors have a handle even when they’re supposed to be pushed. These doors are called ‘Norman Doors’ because Don Norman first coined the term when using these doors as an example of bad UX design. If we were to apply good UX design to a door, we would first assess whether the door was supposed to open inwards or outwards and then give the user the correct mechanism to perform the right action. It’s frustrating for people when we try and open a door only to realize that we’re doing it the wrong way, but when businesses have websites and digital products and their users don’t know what to do or how to achieve their goals, it can have a huge negative business impact. That’s why UX design is such a lucrative and in-demand career path at the moment.
The Most Important Steps of a Good UX Design
Let’s look at some of the steps that are involved in UX design. Typically, there are five fundamental steps: understand, analyze, ideate, validate, and iterate.
Understanding is about understanding the user’s needs, motivations, and goals. Analysis is about interpreting data and research in a clear direction. Idea generation involves generating ideas and finding ways to solve users’ problems. Validation is the step where UX designers test their new ideas with real people. Iterate is where the UX designer goes back through these stages and continuously improves and develops a product or service over time.
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UX Designer Daily Tasks
Let’s look at some of the things a UX designer does day to day. To tie it back to the five steps we just mentioned in the understand stage, a UX designer will conduct research and interviews to really dig in and understand the frustrations and motivations in a user’s behavior.
- In the analysis stage, they formulate data, derive insights, and assess patterns and trends.
- In the ideation stage, they’ll start turning those insights into concepts and often bring other people in to work with them to generate ideas.
- In the validation stage, they’ll create prototypes to test their ideas and run experiments with real users and customers.
- The iterate stage is more of a mindset where they’ll go back and repeat these stages in a cycle in order to have continuous improvement.
The UX Design Process
To create a good UX design, designers should implement a design thinking process. According to the Institute of Design at Stanford, the design thinking process has five stages: empathize, define ideas, prototype, and test.
The empathize step is about understanding the target audience. During this stage, UX designers conduct user research to gain insights from the customer’s perspective. The data can be collected through interviews, surveys, and other methods. After collecting data, a UX designer analyzes it and defines the goals users want to achieve or the core problems they need to solve. Then, designers create user personas to represent the target audience during the UX design process. Personas also help designers understand the user flow from start to finish and create a sitemap based on it. The third stage is ideation. UX designers brainstorm and generate design ideas based on different touch points of the customer journey. For instance, UX designers will answer questions like how to design a website
Optimized for different screen sizes or how to improve the interaction design of a website. The next step is creating a prototype of the final product. Simple paper sketches or even website test pages are examples of prototypes. UX designers use a method called wireframing to arrange the information architecture of the prototype. After that, they can use the prototype to conduct user testing and collect user feedback. After finalizing All Phases, UX designers must present the findings to the clients, the company stakeholders, or the design team. Once approved, they’ll collaborate with UI designers, interaction designers, and web developers to execute these ideas.