What is the UX (User Experience) Design?
The User Experience Design (UX or UX Design or UXD) is the design from the beginning to the end of a product and experience accruing to the user of the product.
What could be this product? It could be a website or an application. It could however also be a product of the physical world e.g. the switch is flashing and changing the intensity of light in our homes. Let’s just stick to the web.
Of course, we know what it is to design a website. One with which we are not yet familiar is the design of the experience we offer to our user, or more correctly the various groups of users. But let’s get down correctly.
What are the features of the UX design?
Starting in design for example, a website we have in our minds, an image of what we want: we want our website to be beautiful, easy to use and meets the objectives of e.g. to complete the visitor an online purchase. What happens 99 times out of 100 is the job of the designer to finish when the prototypes are complete, which could be the static HTML files. In reality the job of a UX Designer begins now.
This is because the User Experience Design has two key features:
- The measuring
- The modification and improvement
What does measuring mean? It means to ask some critical questions such as: How behaved visitors watching the X page? What did they do immediately after? How many abandoned the effort and how many completed the task? In how much time?
And what is modification and what is improvement? Means that the UX Designer has to make changes based on the measurements of expecting better results such as: What can I do to improve the experience of my visitors? Where I was wrong? What other can I try? What to add and what to remove from my website?
How do we perform the measurements?
There are many ways and all based on getting to know our guests. Some very popular are:
- With direct interviews
- With Usability Tests
- With questionnaires
- Using statistics tools, example Google Analytics
- With A / B Testing
- Even setting up a forum where members talk about their experience with the product
- Each of the above techniques has too many parameters, they deserve an article each, so let us not move another.
If we do not know what is the experience that derives a user of our website, we will never know what he thinks. Therefore, we will never be able to improve the online experience (or if you do it, will be for something very striking or luck).
Of course, each should know what we measure. Not all questions are the same value e.g. how many pages he saw a visitor to an online shop, has much less value than, how many visitors eventually abandoned the purchase process in the middle. He needs experience, deep knowledge and thinking before ruling positions.
How the improvements carried out?
They are made with very specific changes. No change example the whole page to see the difference in behavior of my users. (This will spook regular visitors anyway.) I change certain respects e.g. light position and color of a call to action button.
Made quickly. The UX Design must be fast, flexible, smart, what you say agile. After the measurements, decisions are made and implemented immediately. How many times have you saw a detail has been changed on Facebook or Amazon and after a week is not there?
If it observed that a more drastic change, then this becomes a more natural design. When the measurement is done correctly, then the improvement follows in a natural way, even if this is something bigger.
Why do we need it?
The short answer: because we make our websites more successful and this is measured in profits.
Less short answer: the UX Design’s mission to the radiography group of our users and to make life easier. When the browsing of a visitor to a website is better, then he will more easily trust it. And when it comes down to trust, which is the best status update, the traffic, the products and services (even indirectly to websites and not direct selling — e.g. Facebook is not an e-shop but sells a bunch of other things, right?) .
The UX Design must be a tool in each startup
In reality it is a tool of any website. The more complex and more traffic, the more important. Precisely for these reasons it is an ongoing process that begins with the start of a project.
After all this, if you hear someone say that the design is just how “it styles” a website, then this man is or ignorant or wicked or both together.
It shows how a visitor interacts with it.. there are things that can take off or destroy a good development effort as though he has been in the back-end. It is time to realize and give the User Experience Design the gravity it deserves.
To master a new technology, you have to play with it.
Jordan Peterson
