So You Want to Be A UX Designer…
A little bit about what UX designers do on a daily basis.
As a student of user experience design, I knew I really liked the concept of UX design — but to be honest, I went into the program still not having a clue what I would be doing at a job as a full time UX designer. I know that UX designers improve user experiences, but what tasks and deliverables do they perform and produce once they’re in a job? So to educate myself, and hopefully some others, I set out to answer this question.
A whole lot of research
What I found is that, it changes a lot day-to-day what tasks you’ll be working on. But one things for sure, research will always be a valuable part of the process as a UX designer. It is important for UX designers to understand the current state of a product, and in order to do that, research methods are necessary. In a work environment, that might look like performing an analytics audit, a content audit, and/or a competitive analysis report. Doing this preliminary research can reveal current data about conversion problem areas, evaluate current content, understand current industry standards and overall analyze if a product is performing well and if there are new opportunities.
More research, but this time around the user
It probably isn’t a shock that UX designers spend time researching the user, since it is a people-oriented profession. The core idea is that everything relates back to the user and their experience and to improve that experience the designer must understand the users behaviors, goals, motivations and needs. In a work place, the tasks you might be in charge of completing on the user research side can include empathy mapping, user interviews, developing personas, user journeys, writing use cases, and conducting surveys.
All of these are done to better understand and empathize with the user. Empathy mapping gives you deeper insight into your user, and user interviews help you develop accurate personas. User journeys, use cases and user stories (nowadays storyboards are used as well) can all help you understand the user’s perception of the product and their behavior. Surveys are a quick and inexpensive way to measure user satisfaction and collect feedback.
Improving Information Architecture
For a lot of us, the product we are improving will be a website, or an app — which means a lot of time will be spent deciding how to arrange things so that they are understandable. This will manifest itself in your daily workload in tasks like creating navigation, site maps, taxonomies, and wireframes. Card sorts are used often to understand the best way to improve these aspects. Site maps allow you to easily visualize the current structure and navigation of the website. Taxonomies result from exploring ways to better categorize content and data so that they support the user’s goals. Wireframes are the fastest, easiest way to visually show and discuss ideas with team members and stake holders, especially since you can just sketch them out on a sheet of paper.
Developing Prototypes
There is usually additional design around prototypes that ensures interfaces are built with thoughtful and logical behaviors and actions in mind. How will the user interact with the product? A common way to answer that is to develop a user flow diagram, in which user’s actions to complete tasks are visually represented in order to identify areas that need to be redesigned. In order to truly simulate these actions and test the product, prototypes are then developed. Prototypes are mid-to-high fidelity representations of your final design, and allow you to test the product before fully investing in it.
Tests, Tests and more Tests
To truly know if you have created an improved experience, you will most likely be performing different user tests to confirm the effectiveness of your research and design. These often depend on budget and time, but might include usability testing, A/B or multi-variate testing, beta testing more surveys, and sometimes focus groups (though focus groups should never be the only testing method performed). Usability testing allows you to watch and hear your user navigate your product to complete specific tasks. Beta testing, as well as A/B and multi-variate testing all allow you to test-run and compare which design is most effective. Focus groups informally allow users to express their needs and feelings and they can be performed before implementation and after.
Collaborate and Reiterate
Maybe most importantly, you will be collaborating with many people on a day to day basis. UX designers can interact with many different departments, clients, stakeholders and others depending on the project. Getting frequent feedback from team members and co-workers is a great and necessary tool to improve work and brainstorm. Finally, reiteration is key, as improving user experience is an ongoing process. Projects are ongoing and you and your team may go through many rounds of this research, prototyping and testing and make sure you keep consistently improving the user experience.
If you want to dive deeper into these day-to-day tasks, check out this article from Smashing Magazine.
