What is UX Design?
Author: Paulami Bandyopadhyay
The term user experience was first introduced in the late 1990s by cognitive psychologist Donald A Norman. Here’s what he once said,
“ I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were extremely good. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system, including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. Since then, the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to gain its meaning.”
What is UX Design?
UX Design or User Experience Design is the process, teams use to create products that provide relevant and meaningful experiences to users when they engage with it.
Often times, designers hear that UX means “making products look good”, “selecting square or round boxes” (while they refer buttons or cards) or UX issues affect only web designers.
Wrong!
User experience isn’t about just web design and design is not just about aesthetics. The entire look and feel, content and functionality of a product is responsible for a “good user experience”. And that’s why it’s important that everyone involved in a project has some understanding of UX.
As Steve Jobs said,
Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.
A UX designer is guided by the principles of design thinking process to understand and advocate for the needs and goals of the user. And this begins with empathizing. But is it enough to just listen to the user? No, we need to understand the business requirements and the technical constraints too. That is how the business goals will be blended with the user goals and solutions will be sustainable. Designers do a lot of user research to discover what is really needed from the product or experience.
In the next stage, the problems, needs and goals are clearly defined which naturally leads into the ideation stage where UX designers come up with possible solutions for the problem they have defined. Next, in the prototyping stage, the solutions are built into a functioning model which can be shared with stakeholders and also tested for usability. Based on the feedback received, solutions may need to be iterated.
This process takes on the entire life cycle of a product and involves coordination and communication between a lot of people — from users to fellow designers to developers and stakeholders.
Why User Experience Matters?
A good user experience can improve a customer’s perceptions of a brand’s trustworthiness, reliability, and quality. It is target-oriented and user-oriented and allows organizations to define customer journeys on their products that are most conducive to business success.
Final Thoughts
Do UX Designers design user experience? No!
Designers do not have much control over a person’s perception and responses. They cannot design experience as it refers to a user’s impression of the product.
What they can create are conditions that are likely to lead to a positive impression. What is more practical is to gather enough data, analyze it and understand how a user might respond or react to a product. The goal is to design “for” the positive experience.
One cannot design a user experience, only design for a user experience. In particular, one cannot design a sensual experience, but only create the design features that can evoke it.”
— Jeff Johnson, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of San Francisco
