You know that feeling when you fall toes over head over some new topic at the university, where you didn’t know much about it and now it is a whole new world, well I fell for the UX design course, yes you read it right it is a great topic that got me so hooked that I am jumping all over the place trying new features, applications, and websites to get the best information and experience out of it.
UX design might not be a career path for me, but it got me interested in the basics that I wanted to learn all about, I summed up my humble knowledge I got from the course in this blog post.
What UX design means
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products” By the Nielsen Norman Group.
By this definition, we can say that UX is about creating the right content, tailor made experience to the right audience. It can be all about designing and re-designing the experience until it fits the expectations of the audience.
A UX design process typically consists of five basic phases, according to https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/7-ux-deliverables-what-will-i-be-making-as-a-ux-designer:
1. Empathize with the users
This phase is all about learning about the users, to understand their needs, how they might react and why, what can be the process they go through while browsing the website or the new application, what they need and where and what might be a distraction to the process we are trying to get them through.
2. Define the problem
This phase can be defined under knowing exactly what the user’s problems are, what issues he/she might encounter while using the application or browsing the website for example. This stage is so important and can involve a lot of re-creations in order to have the perfect copy for the user to use easily and get the best out of it.
3. Ideate
In this phase it is all about generating ideas for design, after having all the information needed about the user in the first two phases, it is now time design time. The design ideas should reflect the customer journey and experience.
4. Prototype
Now, for me at least, it is the fun part when you start turning your ideas into prototypes, which means concrete examples with all the buttons and features needed.
5. Test
In this phase we evaluate the design, which means a sample of your users can test it and get back to you with important feedback on whether the design is suitable for all their needs or not, where they have problems and where they think the design exceeded their expectations.
Conclusion
UX design is all about the users and the details, the customer journey and providing the best experience possible for the customers, It can be considered a fun process for some people, nevertheless this kind of process can be sometimes very deep and requires a lot of changes based on recommendation and user testing.