UI/UX Designer Is Not Just An Artist
Artists are someone who performs and is engaged in arts. Their creations mostly are the symbolization of their emotions. Meanwhile, UI/UX designers are those who design digital products. Not only the appearance of the interface of an application UI/UX designers also have to consider and empathize with the target users who will use their products. Their biggest concern is how to give users the most enjoyable moment of their lives while using the application they designed. To fulfill such a thing, UI/UX designers implement the process of user-centered design (UCD).
User Centered Design
User-centered design (UCD) is a design process which focuses more on the user needs. Users are involved in the design process through interviews, questionnaires, and many other research methods. Normally, people would ask “Why do we need to involve users even though I am a design prodigy?” The essence of creating a product is who, how, and why people use it? A product will be meaningless if no one uses it and one of many reasons is because they do not enjoy using the product. This could be the main focus of UCD–empathize with user needs and how they will use the product–because UCD is all about users.
So how does user-centered design be implemented? Keep in mind that UCD is an iterative process. Hence, a designer might need to repeat one or all necessary steps of UCD to complete the design. There are four steps or phases that need to be followed by designers in each iteration throughout the whole process:
- Understand the context of use–why users will need your products or services
- Specify user requirements–what users need is different from what they want
- Design solutions–preparing wireframes and prototypes so that users can test the flow and functionality of the products.
- Evaluate against requirements–does the product already fulfill all of the requirements needed?
User Persona
To fully implement the user-centered design, UI/UX designers have to know the users of their product; who are they, why they will need and use the product, what they need, and others. Creating a user persona will help designers solve this issue. Simply put, a persona is an imaginary person that represents your users based on their motivations, interests, and frustrations. By this, designers could narrow down the scope of users into several categories. Generally, there are several pieces of information contained in a persona: name, photo, age, location, jobs, frustration, goals, and motivations.
To start creating a persona, a designer might want to do quick research or survey with his users; this can be through an interview process or even an online questionnaire. In my project, our team wants to develop a learning management system. Therefore, we might want to interview teachers, students, lecturers, and others who probably need the system or service. But, we did not do that. Instead, we gather information from an actual sample that already exists through our observation and experience as students and teachers.
The next step is analyzing the interview results and creating a persona. Using the interview results, a UI/UX designer could tell the main categories of persona who will use his product. In my team project, students and teachers are two main persona categories. Then, we highlight the interests, motivations, and frustrations from each persona category. Remember, not all requirements that a user wants must be fulfilled–so be selective.
By creating personas, UI/UX designers can design suitable prototypes that users can test through usability testing (UT). Feedback from users and observations of UT will be evaluated and considered for the next UCD iteration.
References:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/user-centered-design
