Skill Series: User Experience (UX) Design

Key Discussion Points
  • What is UX Design?
  • What is the UX Design process?
What is UX Design?

There is no firm definition of UX, as mentioned in the video, everyone will give you a different answer.

According to a study from the Oxford Journal Interacting With Computers:

The goal of UX design in business is to…

“improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”

So, in a nutshell, you are making people’s lives better and easier when they interact with websites, apps, products or services. 

 

What Is the UX Design Process?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um3BhY0oS2c
The Stages of UX Design
1. Understand

Understand your audience and their problems

Creating a persona

To understand how to appeal to your audience you need to truly understand the ‘average’ person you’re targeting within that audience.

This is the who part of your UX design process.

  • Start with basic information; age, gender, job, where they live, marital status, ext.
  • Decide their personality. Are they introverted? Extroverted? Sporty? Creative?
  • What are their motivations and things that are most important to them?
  • What goals do they have?
  • What are some of their frustrations? 

Persona example below is taken from Inside Design.

For more detail into creating personas have a look at this – 5 essentials for your user persona template (with examples) | Inside Design Blog

Create a Customer Journey Map

  • Represents each step taken by your customers over a specific timeline e.g. of a person deciding to buy a dress off your organisation
2. Research

You may think you know the persona you are appealing to, but doing surveys and understanding your competitors will help you confirm your persona.

3 & 4. Sketch & Design

Wireframes

  • Draw out what you want each of the webpages/app pages to look like
  • Label where you’re going to put text, photos, buttons

Create prototypes

  • Create mock pages or ‘drafts’ for your website
5. Implement
  • Build your website or app using the wireframes you designed
  • There are a variety of website builders (such as Wix, WordPress or Squarespace) that help you implement your designs without the need for coding
6. Evaluate
  • Get other people to use your website or app
  • Ask them to go on a user journey – ‘Can you get to the skill series page from the homepage please?’ – you can record what they do using Google Chrome apps like Loom
  • Ask them questions
    • How easy was that for you?
    • Was there anything you struggled to find? 
  • Adapt your work on the basis of these tests

For more information take a look at the User Experience Design Process.