UX Design Is More Than Just Screen Mockup!
A lot of people working in the Digital area tend to have an understanding biais that we could call « the UX design mirage ».
Of course, the perception of Design clearly depends on the country you live in. For example, in Europe, northern countries are more often advanced on the understanding of the Design discipline (Sweden, Denmark…) while it takes more time in France, my country, to better appreciate the scope of the designer’s job which is too often reduced to aesthetic aspects. Indeed, as Don Norman (the father of UX) explains it very well, UX Design is the set of emotions / interactions felt by a user interacting with a product. It can be screen mockups but UX Design does not stop there and goes far beyond!
“I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.” Don Norman
How UX Design can help to enhance quality?
I don’t understand why it takes such a long time to change this mindset, but let me show you some real use cases through my company to illustrate deeper where UX Design can help companies to increase digital products quality.
As a Design Manager, I am working at Norauto International which is the department dedicated to the digital transformation of Mobivia’s car maintenance brands (Norauto, ATU, Auto 5 & Midas). We are an international organization aiming to accelerate digital transformation for these different brands. A great team and lots of talents and experts.
At the age of Digital Transformation, a lot of companies need to quickly optimize their efficiency, scale their practices and sometimes rethink their whole process.
That’s why Agile methodologies reach so much success these days. It’s “delivery time” and we try to cut each part of the team workflow in Epic, User Story, … aiming to put all these pieces of the puzzle in a seamless workflow optimized for a quick delivery. And after all, it is finally not that easy to perfectly include User Centric methodologies in the Agile frameworks focus on IT development. Having a UX in your team is not enough, the whole team has also to embrace the Design Thinking philosophy.
By the way, in my 20 years design career, I had frequently to answer to the same question, and too often at the end of the project, or sometimes just few weeks before the launch: « Can you bring the UX layer in our project? ». Usually, it was only a UI design need in my stakeholder’s point of view. However, it was most of the time a bigger work than expected. And I usually had to make the stakeholders rethink about the real problem to solve. This anecdote shared by a lot a designers is a really good illustration of the Design maturity state of art in organizations. Experimenting this is also a good way to get the pulse of the Design maturity of the company!
These days, we can see that UX Design is gaining a lot of maturity, helped by the Design community who has spent a lot of time evangelizing the topic. So Head of UX, VP design, UX designer, UI designer, Product designer… thanks to all of us!
Even if I cannot describe the whole UX process, let’s have a look at some real use cases that my team had to deal with and take a look on some design jobs at different key moments of the design process:
UX toolbox is full of great methodologies for a deeper understanding of your Users or also helping collaboration !
User shadowing
User shadowing is a long-established research technique which has only recently come into the limelight and regular use within UX research environments. With my team we like to spend some time with our real end-users (customers or colleagues)
Workshop Design
The power of UX methodologies can put almost anyone to work in a collective and positive way! But create a good workshop that fits well to your context is a tough discipline.
We try to make everyone think as a designer and put ideas on paper with spontaneousness.
Resume a complexe problematic in 3 slides!
Because we do a lot of research in different topics (tools, methodologies, design trends, studies…), we always have to explain some concepts and have to be good at storytelling!
Usability Testing
A key moment in the design process is Usability Testing. The moment of truth of the design workflow! We have several way of testing depending of the context and the project main objective. For example, we can choose to conduct a crowd remote Testing with customers or guerilla Testing (a quick test) in Auto Center with our colleagues.
Persona
A persona is an archetype of a group of users of the interface. This tool guides the design of the product or service. UX personas are fictional characters, built from real data to model target users.
Customer Journey
A Customer Journey is a visual map that describes your users’ journey and all the interactions with your various Touch points. This document is based on user research and helps all the stakeholders to visualise where are the user experience main pain (or gain) points.
Service design
Aiming to get a seamless experience, we need to design the whole journey, not only on digital devices, but also at every steps of user journey. That’s why we try to share a holistic vision of our recommandation.
Card sorting
To design a new website and avoid to have messy navigation menu, we can work on Information Architecture (iA) by doing a Card Sorting to get user centric insights.
Live Design on Figma
Figma is the favorite design tool in 2023 and one of my favorite feature is that it allows designers to work together in real time and from anywhere. A very cool and disruptive tool that change the game of Design!
Stimulate creativity with a serious game
Creativity needs some space to grow well. So it very important to take care of the place where you want to make people think outside the box.
Aligning team vision by designing workflow
A nice formalization of the process can align people and make them work as team well.
So I think these examples will help you to understand what is the value of UX Design and how is important to have this mindset in your team even if you don’t need to build mockups. And I hope you don’t believe anymore in « the UX design mirage »!
Thank you for reading this article and don’t hesitate to share your own use case in order to complete this article!
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