It’s all about reducing the friction
So what exactly do I mean by friction? Well, according to Physics, ‘friction the resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another’. Similarly, as we are moving through our lives, we encounter a number of instances where we experience friction. It can be in the form of a task made tedious or maybe due to lack of something which could’ve made the task smoother.
From confusing directions leading to you losing your way while traveling to a new place, to entire photo gallery getting deleted due to lack of warning while deleting pics. From struggling with the order selection interface while ordering food online to sending money to the wrong person because of complicated app user-flow, we experience friction while performing all kinds of tasks. And in every case, we end up wasting our time and energy for no reason, every time wishing for a far more smoother experience.
And that’s what I think user experience design is all about, it’s about reducing these frictions, to make the experiences more easy, quick & efficient, and thus more enjoyable.
And to do that, we need to first discover the user flow which needs redesigning. If it’s a self-driven project then you can discover by observing, by simply looking at how people around you are doing things. But if you’re in an office setup, usually your clients will take care of the discovering part by come up to you with their products or service which is in a need of some kind of restructuring. This helps in narrowing our focus to a flow or at least a particular field.
Once the flawed flow has been identified, UX researchers are given the task of finding the exact point of the friction in the flow, while also detecting the causes of the friction, using the various user research techniques. Whereas it’s the UX designer’s job to come up with solutions to smoothen the user flow. And it’s not that they directly need to come up with that perfect solution, they can come up with a number of solutions, narrowing it down to one based on user testing and then iterate on their selected solution, refining it with inputs from the end users. And thus ultimately creating a flow provides a truly friction-less experience!
