The Journey of User Experience (UX) Design (1/3)

This article provides you an introduction to the world of User Experience (UX) design.

There are various topics being discussed in the world of UX design, so I tried putting them together in a series of articles covering UX Design, design thinking, usability, user research, interaction design and information visualization.

In the first article of the series we will focus on basics of UX design and design thinking.

A Brief Introduction

User Experience Design, as its name suggests, is about designing the ideal experience of using a service or product. It can involve all types of products and services - think, for instance, about the design involved in a museum exhibition. However the term user experience design is used in relation to websites, web applications and other software applications.

The questions that we as UX designers are concerned with are:

• Does the site or application give the user value?
• Does the user find the site or application simple to use and navigate?
• Does the user actually enjoy using the site or the application?

In general, user experience is simply how people feel when they use a product or service.

Where can UX design found?

UX design can be found in a variety of project environments today, including:

• Complex Projects — the more complicated the project, the more essential UX design is.
• Startups — High-tech startups developing innovative projects need to understand how their users feel even more than established companies do.
• Long projects — The longer the project, the more resources it consumes; thus, UX becomes ever more important to delivering a return on the investment.

UX design is all about guiding product development to ensure how users feel when using our products. It’s not a perfect method and sometimes, even with all the UX design know-how, a product will still fail. However, the appropriate use of UX design does offer a much higher chance that a product will be successful for our clients than products developed without the application of UX design principles.

Design Thinking — Why is it so popular?

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, design thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.

Design Thinking’s phases

• Empathize — with your users
• Define — your user’s needs, their problem, and your insights.
• Ideate — by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions.
• Prototype — to start creating solutions
• Test — solutions

It is important to note that the five phases, stages or modes are not always sequential. They do not have to follow any specific order.

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach specific to design, which involves assessing known aspects of a problem and identifying the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which knowledge is constantly being questioned and acquired so it can help us redefine a problem in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is often referred to as “outside the box thinking”, as designers are attempting to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods. Design thinking offers us a means of digging that bit deeper to uncover ways of improving user experiences.

Factors that Influence User Experience

User Experience(UX) is critical to the success or failure of a product in the market, but what do we mean by UX? All too often, UX is confused with usability, which describes how easy a product is to use. While it is true that UX as a discipline began with usability, UX has grown to accommodate much more than usability, and paying attention to all factors of UX in order to deliver successful products to market.

There are seven factors that describe user experience:

• Useful — deliver non-practical benefits such as fun or aesthetic appeal
• Usable — enable users to achieve their end objective with a product effectively and efficiently.
• Findable —the product must be easy to find, and in the instance of digital and information products, the content within them must be easy to find, too.
• Credible — the ability of the user to trust in the product that you’ve provided.
• Desirable — desirability is conveyed in design through branding, image, identity, aesthetics, and emotional design.
• Accessible — providing an experience which can be accessed by users with a full range of abilities.
• Valuable — deliver value to the business which creates it and to the user who buys or uses it.

The success of product depends on more than utility and usability alone. Products which are usable, useful, findable, accessible, credible, valuable and desirable are much more likely to succeed in the market.

That's all for part 1 of the series

Now we have got basic understanding of UX design and design thinking phases. We will cover usability, user research, interaction design and information visualization in up coming articles of the series, so stay tuned for the updates.