Who is a UX designer?

A UX designer is a person who is involved in making a product useful, usable, desirable, accessible, credible and findable.

How to be a good UX designer?

As a UX designer, you must have a good UX process(which makes your products useful, usable and help the target users achieve their goals) if not, you cannot be classified as a good UX designer.

“A UX designer’s focus is in every way how a user interacts with a product.”

As a UX designer, your UX process matters a lot as that is what a recruiter will be on the look out for on your portfolio and not basically the beautiful images of your work. You may ask me, are the pictures of your project not necessary in your portfolio? Yes,they are necessary but a recruiter who is in search of a UX designer will not focus more on the beauty of your designs but more on your thought process. A recruiter wants to know how you think/approach a problem and solve it. Once you can come up with a good UX process, trust me, your portfolios will no longer be rejected.

UX Process

A good UX process should always have the following steps (including others…) so as to come up with a useful, usable and functional product.

User Research

Ordinarily, the UX process should always start with research. Yes I know you have the product you want to create somewhere in your head but remember you are not creating the product for yourself, rather, it is for the target users.

• speak to using similar products.
• speak to real users in your target audience : identify their needs, pain points, opportunity for improvement and how you can help achieve their goals.

“Always bear in mind you are designing a product for the users and not yourself”.

Design

• Here all you have to do is create a design according to how best you can help achieve their goals based on the “User Research” carried out earlier.
• Your design to revolve around functionality & usability rather than colors and pictures
• Wireframing, information architecture and prototyping will be employed during the design.

Testing

During the process, you are to test the product with other members of your team or target users so as to find out if you did the right thing or you need to make some changes to the design in other to make it functional and satisfy the needs of the target users.

Testing can be done as many times as possible during the product creation.
This process can be achieved by user testing, a/b testing and the likes.

Implementation

It is time to change your designs into live product which can be demoed. Here you will be working closely with the development team. Sorry I forgot to mention earlier that, “carrying along the development team during thedesign process will make your implementation work easier because the development team would have examined your design properly and asked you to iterate if some things are not possible”. My advice is that, work closely with the development team to ease up your work when it comes to implementation.

With this few points I’ve discussed above, I think you should be able to tell if you are actually a good UX designer or if you need to work on some aspects of your UX process.

Feel free to clap 👏🏽