The CXL Institute review as UX Designer (week 10)
My own reflection and insights.
Hello, beautiful beings! Today, I’ll get you through my week number 10 (oh Dear, time flies so fast!) with CXL Institute Mini-Degree.
I must admit, that this week got me really exciting. In today’s post, I will put emphasize to aligning with User needs, and what it really means.
What happens all the time between me and CXL courses is exactly this alignment. The content resonates with my reflections about User Experience Design, what it really means, where are the misconceptions, what I really want to learn, which skills I want to elevate, and what I want to achieve with the UX design process. It also aligns with my intuition about missing things in the process.
Recently, I was preparing a presentation about UX design. What UX really is? One of my friends told me, that he gets an impression, that even people working in this field, can’t easily explain, what it is.
This takes us back to the learning process. My personal opinion is, that learning means understanding. Once you can explain something, it means you really got the idea, and probably, it will stick in your memory for longer. Why am I talking about it?
I feel, there is a lot of information noise about UX and UX design process. Hundreds of articles, videos, books, and post explaining User Experience definition. Here comes another one from me — 101.
What is User Experience and what is User Experience Design?
You see, across many definitions, you’ll find a mix of two ideas trying to capture, what UX really is. They’ll show images like this:
Or like this:
Are they wrong? No, but they are incomplete if separated from each other. You may get an impression, that UX is making Users happy and satisfied. On the other hand, UX is about research. Then you’ll find out, that the best UX representation is famous Norman’s door.
The thing is, some of this shows experience alone, others talk about the designing process, and others just about specific aspects of User Experience design. Only combining all pieces together, we can create a complete definition of the Users Experience and User Experience Design.
If we really want to explain what is User Experience Design, we need to talk about experience definition first and differentiate it from designing.
What is (User) Experience?
Why did I put the word “User” into brackets? Because in my opinion, it is slightly misleading. In the end, we are focused on bringing a good experience to the Audience = Users, that’s true, but it hides the fact, that we are aligning it also with business needs. This is why personally; I prefer to talk about experience alone.
Experience is an impression Users get from the interaction with a product or service.
Easy, fun, clear, surprising, annoying, badly delivered — these are examples of descriptions of the experiences = impressions.
Impressions come from our unconscious part of the mind and are operated in Brain Stem, Little Brain, and Limbic System inside our Brains. Unconscious means, that they happen without our control.
What is (User) Experience Design?
User Experience Design is a process. It is combined of steps, which should help us to make design decisions (solutions) bringing as an outcome a positively described impression of the interaction with the product or service, which results in fulfilling business goals.
The same product can have different designing solutions resulting in a different experiences.
Putting it short, during the User Experience Design process, we go through specific steps to implement design solutions, which results in Users and business satisfaction.
Is User Experience design only about creating good impressions?
My feeling was, it shouldn’t be. And that’s what CXL courses helped me to prove to myself and helped me to find answers to what my intuition was telling me.
Optimizing layouts, visuals, overall design alone is not a key, if we are aiming for specific goals through the design of a website, application, any other product or services.
Why? It’s not the color of the button alone and overall appealing visual design that triggers an action in our Users. It’s motivation.
It is motivation, that they already bring to us when they enter our website or an app. That’s why they appeared here. They already wanted something. We can’t create that. We can only resonate with that. How?
As I mentioned before, impressions (experience) is perceived in our unconscious mind, and it is processed in specific parts of the Brain. By talking to the Brain, by delivering key messaging for the User in the way, they can be processed easily by the Brain you can add boost and align with the motivation Users already have.
How? By implementing psychology principals, using cognitive bias, correctly defining your Audience, and by being relevant to everything you’ve learned about them.
Refined definition of User Experience Design
My current version of UX design definition is:
User Experience Design is a process, combined with specific steps, which lead to the implementation of design solutions resulting in:
- supporting Users initial motivation
- bringing the ability for performing key actions
- Resonating emotionally with the User (Information Architecture, User Flow, Customer Journey, Visual Cues)
- helping to achieve business goals
Working on templates is just a small part of the change you can make to observe changes and uplifts, where you want them. If you’re interested in a real change in the behavior, the standard you need to meet is working on “talking to the Brain”.
This is why many A/B tests, strategies, and work of huge teams fail — what they are delivering isn’t noticeable for the Brain.
5 Neuromarketing hacks
There are many psychological and persuasion principals you can use to combine the UX process with addressing the Brain. There are 5 proposed by Andre Morys that a great starting point, and you can observe them being used in advertisements, at websites all the time.
1. Raise motivation 🚀 — Users already come to you with the motivation they had. You can use copy, visual cues, cognitive biases to boost this motivation and give information, that this motivation can find its place on your website or in your application.
2. Mere exposure effect 🌟— whether we like it or not, the more we see something, the more we like it. Invest in the advertisement, work on the right Audience targeting.
3. Loss aversion 🙈— “people’s tendency to strongly avoid losses to acquire gains”. Nobody likes to lose, and we prefer to make ourselves comfortable by preventing it.
4. Emotional resonance 💥 — things that are emotionally relevant are a base for any persuasion. Use it, to build persuasion on top of that.
5. Bandwagon effect 🙎♀️🙎♂️🙎♀️🙎♂️🙎♀️🙎♂️🙎♀️🙎♂️🙎♀️🙎♂️🙎♀️🙎♂️ — it can be applied, when the Audience is large. This effect describes a human’s tendency to believe or do something more because a large number of other people do or believe so. This is how trends are formed.
What I learned: First of all, that my intuition tells me a right thing ☺️ second, that we need to be very careful with the interpretation of A/B testing, and that UX design separated from psychology, persuasion, and neuromarketing can be effective only on a small fraction of aspects, which truly affect Users’ behavior
How will I apply it: I’ll do more 5 seconds test, and investigate cognitive biases even more, and take every chance to implement 5 neuromarketing hacks, which works perfectly for major giants in e-commerce (like booking.com, Airbnb, and others).
This post could be longer, but I wanted to start and share with my personal insight about UX design process definition, to introduce additional knowledge from this week as a natural continuation next week. Stay tuned! I’ll talk to you about The Slide Persuasion and practical application of Neuromarketing in combination with the UX design process 🥰.