How to Explain UX Design to Your Parents
As designers, I think we’ve all struggled with explaining UX to people who aren’t familiar with it.
“UX design is basically when you design the user experience or interface.”
“What does that mean?”
Even when you try to explain those terms, people’s eyes glaze over and you realize that they don’t make anything much clearer. So if you have a friend, old family member, anyone who doesn’t quite understand what UX is (or if you yourself sometimes struggle with explaining it succinctly)— this may be the article for you!
What really is “user experience design”?
User experience is everywhere: it’s how you feel after every interaction, whether that’s with a product, system or service. Frustrated with customer service phone calls? User experience. Loving the way that a specific app feels? User experience.
A designer’s goal is to make their product useful, easy and pleasant for the user. They do this by deeply understanding user needs and objectives before, during and after product development to make sure that those needs are met. This is why UI/UX design has ties to psychology, marketing, and other behavioral sciences — there must be a fundamental understanding of the user and their behavior in order to create a positive experience for them. It’s also why design tends to be a rather long and elaborate process.
What is the design process?
Known as “design thinking”, this is a common outline that follows around 5–6 of the same steps. However, design thinking tends to be an iterative process and depends on what you are designing — some stages might be revisited at a later time or overlap. There is no one correct or linear way to design something!
- Empathize (Research)
The first stage involves trying to understand the problem you are attempting to solve. This can be done by conducting user and market research or individual interviews. Information collected through this stage provides direct insight into user needs, wants, motivations, behavior, and more.
2. Define (Needs & Problems)
Once the user research is collected, now the designer must analyze this information to understand the “why” and “what” — what are the conclusions that can be drawn? What are the core problems? Why does the user feel this way?
Designers will create user personas to represent different user types for their target audience and put themselves in the user’s shoes. Storyboarding is another common tool to connect the user and the product (like creating a story).
3. Ideate
At this stage, designers begin to come up with ideas and solutions to the problems they’ve identified from the first two stages. The goal is to “think out side of the box” and involves a lot of brainstorming, like making preliminary sketches to visualize those solutions or creating affinity maps to cluster information into groups of similar items.
4. Prototype
There are several steps during the prototype stage. Designers typically start by creating wireframes, which help to visualize the structure and visual hierarchy of the product. Wireframing is extremely important, because it is used as the foundation for later prototypes and mockups.
Prototypes follow wireframes, but they center the actual interaction experience, acting as a simulation for how the product will actually work. Low-fidelity prototypes are clickable, while high-fidelity prototypes are coded.
Throughout this whole process, designers are constantly trying to find the best possible solutions through their prototypes. This is why these prototypes are more scaled down than what the actual product will be like.
5. Testing
Technically the “last” stage of the process, testing is critical because it is the best way designers can receive feedback on how effective their prototypes are. Some activities may include testing sessions, surveys, and analytics. Designers will choose to redesign their problem or make other adjustments to their solutions and prototypes that will better fit the needs of the users. This can also be used to eliminate solutions that didn’t work.
Design isn’t linear, which is why testing often isn’t the last stage: designers have to go back, make changes, and conduct testing again. The objective is always to understand a user’s needs and create an experience that is enjoyable and useful for them.
Now you know what UX is and the general “stages” for designing — but how to ensure that your design can actually be good?
Here are some general principles that most designers should keep in mind.
- Hierarchy: this is how content is organized across an app or site. Visual hierarchy helps users navigate an interface and understand how to use it. Designers must know what features they should make stand out (ex: main menu) and what features that don’t need as much emphasis.
- Consistency: when designing for users, it’s best to keep things consistent and familiar to the users. This makes it easier for them to learn how to use the product, and is also simpler for the designer — there is no need to completely reinvent the look or feel of a product every time.
- Confirmation: when it comes to important actions, it’s crucial to give users the ability to confirm their decisions. An example of this is pop-ups when you want to delete something asking you to confirm if you’re really sure you want to delete it.
- User control: this is important for giving users control over their activity and allowing them to go back or backtrack if they do something by mistake. Some examples are Cancel/Undo buttons, or tracking where they were on a page.
- Accessibility: making a product accessible is extremely important! The ideal goal is to ensure that as many people can use it as possible. Designers should be diligent on removing any problems or obstacles that may be presented to make the experience as smooth as it can be for the user. Accessible design takes into account any potential disabilities that the user may have so that the experience can be equal for everyone.
Conclusion
Hopefully this helped and next time someone asks you what you want to do, you’ll be able to explain what UX is all about! Feel free to check out the following articles to learn more in-depth about certain aspects of design and make sure to come to our club meetings as well — more can be discussed there!
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