My Attempt at Demystifying UX
A Concept Model Approach
When I decided to become a UX designer, I knew that a part of my job would require that I convince people about the value of UX and why an organization should spend money/resources on user research or use a design-thinking methodology. Well, it was surprising to learn, during my job search, that many companies have already jumped on the UX bandwagon — hiring UX designers and researchers left and right. Unfortunately, through conversations with recruiters and hiring managers, I’ve learned that most companies only have a vague idea of what UX really means. They’re wanting to hire someone who they think has the “secret sauce” to designing an awesome product without knowing what this person should be doing.
One of my professors at Carnegie Mellon University encouraged us to draw pictures to help explain concepts. I’ve taken his advice to heart and have made it a point to try to create models or diagrams to explain concepts. If you do a Google image on ‘UX models’, you will see that many people have also tried to tackle this problem. Below, I share a few interesting ones and also introduce my own version.
My Version of A UX Concept Model
In my opinion, you aren’t really thinking about User Experience unless you are actively designing around four components: Visual, Content, Behavior, and Usability. There are areas that are subsets of UX, which I’ve indicated as intersections of the four dimensions (e.g. UI Design, Interaction Design, User Research, and Information Architecture). These sub-areas aren’t necessarily that cut-and-dry and may bleed into other areas.
1 . User Interface (“UI”) Design
Most people think of UX as UI (aka User Interface Design). It’s easy to talk about UI because it’s tangible — the design of a website or an app. Visual and Content are important because it is what the user sees and understands, but it is only one facet of the whole UX experience. A product with a beautiful UI that doesn’t serve the needs of the user will inevitably fail. Furthermore, the future of human-computer interaction may be screen-less! With the advent of sensors and ubiquitous computing, UX designers will need to think about designing for an interface-less experience.
2. Interaction Design (“IxD”)
Many non-designers don’t think about the importance of Interaction Design — which I define as the intersection between the Visual and Behavior dimensions. Interaction designers focus on the user’s goals and designs system behavior (in the form of feedforward and feedback) to allow the user to complete their task seamless and efficiently. Designing system behavior require that the designer know what the product is intended to do and how the user may want to interact with it.
3. User Research
Many companies may say that their customers have already told them what features they should add, or that they don’t have time to send out surveys or conduct focus groups (side note: those are not really the best way to do user research). Adding client-requested features is only going to yield short-term gains potentially causing a cluttered application without any clear direction or purpose. Learning about the user (their goals, attitudes, and behavior) to drive initial product design, and then continually validating design decisions through usability testing (observing how users use the product) is the most effective way to designing a product that is both useful and usable.
4. Information Architecture
Information architecture (the intersection of Content and Usability) is another often overlooked area of UX that is important but not as tangible. Users rely on their mental model of a product to guide them on its usage. Good information architecture can help the user refine their mental model of the product and complete their task more efficiently, whether that be finding information or completing a transaction.
Technology is evolving at a rapid pace; UX should evolve along with it.
User experience is no longer about designing delightful and usable web and mobile experiences. With the advent of big data, the internet-of-things, ubiquitous computing, and AR/VR, UX designers should not be limiting themselves to optimizing a single screen-based interaction with traditional interaction patterns. Rather, designers should take a human-centered design approach by thinking about user needs from a holistic standpoint and then folding in the technology that can support an optimal experience.
