UX Process, is it worth it?
From skipping steps to doing the whole thing…
I started being a UX/UI designer in the field (working and working some more), learned my way through it “organically” without a defined path.
Now I am learning the value of interviewing users to try to understand their needs and pain points. I get to see that it is not what I think of the problem, each person is their own world and see’s things differently. The magic is to find between all those different minds the trends that come back and that need a solution of some kind.
I got to notice that WHAT you ask and HOW you ask it is so important in the process. Prepare your questions before you start an interview, make a script. But really prepare them, think of them and try to understand what you want to get from them. The first time I did an interview I realized my questions where repeating themselves and that I wasn’t getting useful information out of my users. Practice is helping that getting better, to be able to take more information and more data out of my users.
After understanding what do you need to do and why you need to do it the feeling of building something with a reason, with backup data that let’s you know exactly for what and for who are you doing this, is AMAZING.
Learning about a way to filter your users and make a screener survey before your interviews was also super useful. To be able to select specific people that will give you much more valuable information on a specific topic you are researching is very valuable. It enriches the experience and the information you get from this users.
Afterwards, you recollect all this data and transform it into ideas and solutions in the design studio, building a topic map, prioritizing your features and building a MoSCoW map that later on after synthesizing all your data and understanding it more clearly you will start sketching and creating a burst of visual ideas. Later on you will organize all this ideas, take all the valuable ones that where in the table and build your prototype.

After building your prototype, the user testing comes into place. Did you built really something that people can interact with and understand? How can you prove that?. The whole process of building a script and scenarios where people have to complete tasks with your prototype let’s you understand so much about the thing you just created. The ability to see people interact the prototype gives you SO MUCH information about your design and how it is perceived. It is crazy that you sometimes can’t even imagine people will see something completely different than what you intended.
To feel you are creating something with a meaning that it is going to help to those people you intended to help and it is working because you made sure to test it over and over till it made sense and took form.
UX is a never ending discipline of synthesizing data and make sense of it to build a product and then test it and then come back to it and understand what are going to be your next steps, and this starts again over and over, because the experience of the user it is always a changing thing, you can always improve it and adapt it and discover insights that will then become features.
Thinking that UX unites psychology, people’s experiences, technology, understanding and creating solutions it’s what makes this field so rich and completely passionate for those who are part of it.
I think the learning experience in this field is always moving and changing and that is exciting…

