Designing for User Experience

The easy step!


Since I start learn design, I’m starting to realize the importance of user experience (UX) on everything. What is user experience, and why is it important? For me, every good design has a good user experience. The experience that you got while playing on game center, the system blueprint design of Disneyland, and beautiful website that was un-confusing was a part of—long planning from user experience design.

Have you ever seen a horrible website? The menu was distracting, ads could be seen anywhere, there’s no particular hierarchy, you don’t even know why you open the website. It’s a disaster. Don’t follow the same path, you can make it better. So, how do you design the UX for—maybe your business or personal website? Don’t fret—its just consists of 5 fundamental steps, they are:

  1. Personal objective
  2. Define your target audience
  3. Research their intention
  4. Inline the design with audience intention
  5. Test and repeat

for this problem, let’s use my personal website as an example


1. Personal objective

This website is intended to share my personal experiences, perspective, and knowledge to others. That’s why I divided my categories to Guidance and Reflection. Guidance includes theory, motivation, new knowledges, and helpful article; while Reflections category is subjected as personal journal of ongoing events in my life.

Other than that, I do design. My clients can get information about me from my Behance page, illustration works from Instagram, and also referral from past works. There’s a big chance my potential clients are going to open my website to know more about me. That’s why in the near future, I’m planning to integrate my design works & thinking behind them on another category called “Study Case”.

Meanwhile, let’s keep focusing on Guidance and Reflection category.


2. Define your target audience

Based on my objective, my target audience are:

  1. Friends.
  2. Learners.
  3. Potential design clients who want to know me personally.


3. Research their intention

Because each of them have different needs, I created an importance ranking for each target market to know best about their intention.

  1. Friends. (Reflection, Guidance and Works)
  2. Learners. (Guidance, Works, Reflection)
  3. Clients. (Works, Reflection, Guidance)

My friends are casual reader. They sparingly get information about my blogs from social media links. Some of them opens it, some of them aren’t quite interested. I also know some of them are also quite a learner. that’s why guidance are on second importance on “Friends” list. They are more interested on “Reflection” category—as it was subjected for my personal life.

Learners are everyone who can access the internet. They get my blogs from SEO, friends refferal, and me—posting my blog on relevant article from learning platforms. They need article that was short, brief, and straight to the point.

Clients want to know about my works and about myself. Good clients will research about who they gonna work with. That’s why it’s a good idea to have a “study case” category in the future.

From all of these intention, lets sums up their needs and expectation:

  • Quality content is necessary.
  • Easy website access for each category are important.
  • Design works are needed on first page to minimize the confusion of my personal website intention—specifically for client.
  • Structured article are important for learners.
  • Learners love to share. That’s why a—good social media integration are needed.
  • Study case category is essential to be implemented.
  • Reminder system for new blogpost keep visitors up to date and engaged.


4. Inline the design with audience intention

Now, let’s design and integrate the audience needs to my personal blog:

  • Quality content is something that I’ve been working on. I’m still learning how to write better; so please excuse my grammar mistakes.
  • The best solution to access category is when people hover the “TOPICS” menu—Reflection, Guidance, and Study Case sub-menu are showing out. I still can’t implement it—because I can’t design website coding, and the same solution aren’t presented on this particular theme. Solution: get a web designer.
  • About the design work on first page, I’m planning to change the “latest post” first page—into a static page that consist of 2 picture, left-brain and right-brain. Left brain go straight to blogpost, and right brain go straight to “study case” category.
  • Structured article have been implemented.
  • Social media integration for sharing also have been implemented lately. Notice that—on every last post, reader can share the article to their social media without copy-paste hassle.
  • Study case: I’m still working on this category.
  • Reminder for engaging visitors are solved by newsletter. If you are interested, you can keep up to date—here.
  • I don’t use ads, because it was distracting the reading experience.
  • Minimal theme and big type are used to keep the user engaged and focused with the content.

sum up:

  • keep writing to improve the article quality.
  • get a web designer. (sub menu and first page).
  • iterate my portfolio thinking for “study case”.


5. Test and repeat

By asking visitors opinion about my website, I can get a more—meaningful-quality insight about what should I do to improve my website experience.


Conclusion

I hope these 5 steps of UX are easy enough to follow. If you have any opinion, let’s discuss it below!