What the h@%# is a UX Designer?
Guest Contribution
An Overview on UX Design
What the heck is a UX Designer? This is the question I personally had asked myself when coming across this term for the very first time while career hunting online. I had a wild hunch that it’s a designer that designs UX stuff. But……what’s UX? Hmm.
Being very intrigued, I set out on an extensive, yet adventurous journey of researching and trying to understand in layman’s terms of what UX Design is, the purpose of it, and what effect it has in our everyday lives.
Why do we, as humans, even need UX Designers, as we already have enough designers designing cool things for us? Right? (my ignorance working overtime)
Ok. So after days of arduous research, I concluded from my understanding that…
UX Design = User Experience Design!
The end. Thank you….Just kidding! :)
User Experience Design is design that “humanizes technology.”
We can define UX Design as an iterative process which uses a human-centered approach to design, where the users’ needs are at the forefront and taken into account at every stage of the product or service, either tangible or digital.
Understanding and considering users’ behaviors, motivations, perceptions, and their environments during every process of UX Design is essential, as it plays a crucial role in the success or failure of the product.
The phases of the UX Design’s iterative process include:
User Research Phase, Defining Phase, Ideation Phase, Prototyping Phase, and Testing Phase
An essential and crucial step in UX Design is ..Iterations, iterations, and more iterations!
Here is a video to further illustrate the importance of a human-centered approach to design:
https://medium.com/media/6606958ed8147ab268f0195cae61070d/href
Copyright Mathew Mifain
User Experience Design comprises of many different disciplines all aiming to improve the ease of use and increase the enjoyable aspects of a design, as illustrated below:
To further convince you that human-centered design is essential in product success, let’s examine some products (digital and tangible) that didn’t take into account users’ needs:
Google Glass = BAD DESIGN
Why a bad design ? The product was aesthetically unappealing, invaded user privacy as you can record wherever you were looking, and awkward as users would need to give commands out loud, especially in public. Google Glass lacked clear function, and a $1500 price tag made this product unaffordable for everyday users, thus, impractical to use. TOTAL FAIL
Confusing/Unmemorable Password = BAD DESIGN
Why a bad design? Users are being requested to create a password with various constraining requirements, which causes user frustration, resulting in the users possibly never returning to the site. TOTAL FAIL
As we can see from the above examples, bad designs resulted from not considering user’s needs. In order to provide users with a positive, pleasurable, and memorable experience, human-centered approach to design is essential taking into account users’ needs, motivations, behaviors, and their environments when designing products or services.
http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/5-reasons-google-glass-miserable-failure-01462398
https://manifesto.co.uk/happy-tale-user-experience-design/
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