What exactly is UX Design ??— 82nd Monthly Technical Session
An intro to UX Design specifically for Devs, by yours truly, a Dev (and how the design thinking process is beneficial to you as well)
Take your phone in hand. Open up your favorite app. It can be anything, really — social media, banking, note-taking, Pokémon Go…just go ahead and launch the app. Tap around, study it, press buttons and ask yourself:
Why do I like this app ? What exactly do I like about it ? Why is it my favorite app, and why do I like this one better in comparison to other, similar apps that are available out there ?
I encourage and invite you to think about it from various perspectives.
As you engage in the above exercise, various thoughts and reasonings may have come up in your mind. Allow me to make a couple of modest predictions on what you came up with. You may have noted the overall look and feel of the app, characterized by its colors and sleek fonts. Or perhaps you liked the greeting animation that is triggered when you first launched the app. Maybe you liked how easy it is to switch from one important document to another, and how little time it takes to find the things that matter most to you.
Nevertheless, what I just brought up, and what you just interacted with, can broadly be defined as the UX of the app.
…which begs the question: what is UX ??
What the heck is UX ?? And what exactly is UX Design ??
UX Design stands for User Experience Design. There are many different names in the industry for it, including but not limited to Interaction Design, UX/UI, UX Research, and UI Design. Although each of these terms differs in specific nuance, it is oftentimes used interchangeably.
Some common misconceptions about UX Design
“You have to be good at art or be good at drawing to be a UX Designer.”
Not necessarily. I know plenty of wonderful UX Designers who can legitimately only draw stick figures. This is because UX Design does not equal beautiful art.
“UX Design is all about making your software look nice and pretty”
Yes !! and no. A part of UX Design is about aesthetics, yes. But that is not the only thing that UX is about. Just because a piece of software looks really nice doesn’t mean it has good UX.
To put it in programmer terms…
pretty_exterior != good_UXDemonstration of Bad UX
To make clear what differentiates good UX from bad UX, I’ll start by introducing an example of bad UX. Here is a screenshot from my university’s old student dashboard in comparison with their new student dashboard. This online portal, internally referred to as Wolverine Access allows students at the University of Michigan to access all sorts of resources, from checking their grades, receiving financial aide, and applying for student housing on campus.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the “Classic” or what I have referred to as the old Wolverine Access has since been deprecated and replaced with the new view. This is due to the fact that in order for a student to do something as simple as checking their grades, they had to go through 10 different screens, locate several inconspicuous links that are poorly marked, and go through several login protocols. The whole process took up maybe 10 minutes, (5 if you were really lucky )— it was a train wreck, where even seasoned fifth-year seniors struggled to locate their grades.
This is poor UX. If you are in need of more examples of bad UX, kindly visit any Japanese website available on the internet. As pointed out by my lovely HENNGE colleagues, the majority of Japanese websites still feature a horrible user experience.
Our study of poor UX points us to some clues on what UX Design is really about →
UX Design is about…
- Making client-side applications or programs as easy to use as possible. Intuitive, with little to no friction.
- Improve a user’s life, not make it harder.
- Identify and define problems or challenges that a user faces. Develop creative solutions to help solve this problem.
- Provide guidelines for Devs to create the final product.
- Creating a unified brand identity and consistency across platforms in an application.
The Design Thinking Process
In order to achieve the above goals, UX Designers widely employ what is commonly known as the Design Thinking Process.
Talking about this process in depth goes a little beyond the scope of this article. But here is a brief overview. There are five main steps to this process that will help you think like a designer.
- Empathize
Designers place themselves in the shoes of potential users and see the world/task at hand from their perspective. Be empathetic. At this stage, it is integral to remove any internal biases to truly understand the design problem and user’s specific challenges. Empathy is key to every step in this process, but the most so in this stage.
- Define
Using the information gathered from Step 1, designers provide a clear definition of the design problem at hand. This makes for a very focused, concentrated effort towards effectively addressing the problem, and appropriately mitigating the challenge.
- Ideate
Designers come up with several potential solutions to the problem defined in Step 2. The more ideas at this stage, the better, regardless of how “good” your solution may be on the surface level. Numbers matter more than quality at this point, as it raises the chance of you generating a truly effective idea and potential solution.
- Prototype
Choose the strongest ideas you came up with, and create a prototype of that solution. In the context of software, this involves creating mockups of the application.
- Test
Actually, hand the prototype to potential users and the target audience. Note how they react and interact with it.
This is the general flow of the design process. But, as the diagram shows, finding the best solution isn’t always a linear process.
That being said, here are two key points that I really want to drive home to you, and want you to remember, if anything, from my writing — my emphasis on empathy and human-centered design. Practicing empathy is so important when devising solutions to a problem, as it helps redefine and rescope a highly technical software problem to a human-centered design. We must prioritize actual people instead of our technical expertise when developing new technology.
…so why should Devs care about and even be familiar with UX Design ?
- Actively thinking about UX adds a human element to what can otherwise easily become monotonous or “cold” work. Witnessing a solid cause and effect of the products you are engineering can make your work super fulfilling. Further, by practicing the Design Thinking Process, it allows for you to practice having empathy for people and consider alternate perspectives.
- …what is the point of building something that is unusable for the general public? No matter how amazing your product is, no matter how cutting edge your elite coding skills are, no one will want to use it if it is incredibly difficult to use.
- By designing something before programming it, and disassociating the behavior of your application from its technical logistics, you are able to keep your technical skill from limiting what you create. The sky is the limit, folks.
In conclusion, UX Design is a key ingredient to any successful product or application. Whether it be for personal use or for large-scale corporate projects that involve actual money. It can truly make or break a product, and it’s a surefire way to give yourself an edge over potential competitors and differentiate yourself from the crowd.
And above all else. the two key points I really, really want to drive home today are the sheer importance that empathy and human-centered design holds within tech.
Kaoru Murai is a second-year student at the University of Michigan. She interned with the HENNGE Global Internship Program from May 17th to June 11th, 2021. This article was adapted from her 82nd Month Technical Session presentation, “Intro to UX Design for Devs” The full presentation slide-deck can be found here.
