UX is more than just pretty design work
Last year, I graduated (yay!) as a proud Human-Computer Interaction graduate from Indiana University. Throughout my program, I noticed that although the design was one of the most interesting topics to discuss out there, talking to people about my program was surprisingly hard!
As I began talking to my relatives or Uber drivers, they would be curious about what I was studying. However, as soon as I said “HCI” or “Human-Computer Interaction” they would give me puzzled looks, or the “?” face. This made me want to explain myself and I usually tried to find the best way to describe UX to them, especially because I wanted them to know that UX is so much more than just colors. However, throughout this, I couldn’t help but feel a mixed bag of feelings — happy to explain my program but also I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to articulate?
We’ve all heard of the term “designers,” and when we hear it, the first thing that comes to our minds is usually — colors, creativity, and drawings. I always try to give real-world commonly used examples like — “It is designing the apps and screens on your phone or the app gallery — the thought process and psychology behind that” — but is that all that UX or HCI is? It made me feel unsatisfied as I cut short the vast array of different activities that make up UX and I think it’s sad to see so few people realize this.
Another challenge of ambiguous definitions for UX that most of my classmates and I faced was during our job hunts. Each job description with the word “designer” in it, sounded very similar to the other, but they ranged from Interaction designers, UX designers or Product designers, etc.! At that time, this worried me, because I feared that I might end up in a job where the team’s expectations were ambiguous as some of my friends did in their internships.
Since then I felt that there is a need to emphasize how UX isn’t just colors and drawings.
“UX is (in simple words) — making an artifact as human-like as possible so that all of the intended users can use it in the most obvious manner — with a pinch of ‘something extra’ (the delight factor).”
And it doesn’t always have a screen. Technology with screens, like mobiles and laptops, are just the most commonly used artifacts with the most amount of users. A UX practitioner also understands the psychology behind a person’s behavior and designs an artifact in a way that mitigates the error percentage while the intended audience uses the artifact.
I use the word “artifact” because, it could be anything, as mentioned in “Design of everyday things” by Don Norman, even a simple door contains UX. To solve the “Push/pull” problem, they put a handle only on the side of the door that is intended to be pulled and a horizontal bar on the side that needs to be pushed. That mitigates the error percentage. So in simple terms —
“UX design is the skill to solve real-world problems in ways that seem “obvious” to people.”
Technology such as IOT or audio related feedback for the blind also contains UX — although they are without screens.
Basically, where there’s a user, there’s an experience which can be made better — where there’s a user, there’s UX.
Making a user’s experience better by understanding the most “obvious” way isn’t easy. There’s a lot of different expertise involved in making everything come together -
UX is just an umbrella term for all of those skills.
For example, an interaction designer has the skills to understand the user flows and create low fidelities, whereas a UI designer focuses on current UI patterns and makes it high-fidelity with a Visual designer who makes it pixel perfect. More in-depth information about this can be found on various websites like this one.
I feel lucky to be a part of the RingCentral UX team where the team not only understands the array of different skills under the UX umbrella but also provides an opportunity to learn other skills under from each other.
Have you ever faced a similar challenge of explaining your job role or passions as I faced explaining UX to my friends? Let me know and share your experience with me!
