Welcome to What Is User Experience Design.
This learning activity introduces you to what user experience design
is and how it improves product development.
What is user experience design? Unlike traditional design,
User Experience Design combines functionality
with usability. User Experience Designers
always take the end-user into consideration, so products designed by
User Experience Designers
are typically easier to use.
While you may have heard the terms User Experience Design,
or designing for the user, you may not have really understood what these terms
mean.
User Experience Design is more than just creating a product or application,
It's about understanding your users and designing a product for them
that is not only usable, but also gives them a great experience.
Understanding User Experience Design is great, but what does it mean in terms of
practical applications?
Let's say your company spends millions of dollars
creating the absolute best widget on the planet. This widget can do
anything and everything any widget owner has ever wanted.
But when the new widget hits the market, no one buys it.
Your customers' feedback starts rolling in and you learn that your users don't
know how to use the new widget,
because the design is confusing and it's clumsy to hold.
How did that happen? Why was the greatest widget ever
unsuccessful?
The widget failed because it wasn't designed with the user in mind.
Traditional product designers spend hours creating what they feel are the
perfect products,
applications, or websites. These projects become the designer's babies.
The designers love their babies, their families are proud of their babies,
and their friends are convinced to love their babies.
When traditional designers finally share their babies with others
and start hearing negative feedback, they struggle to accept that their creations
aren't perfect.
They may also be biased against any criticisms and suggestions for
improvement. They can have a hard time understanding why
others don't love their babies and resist making any changes to their
original designs.
So, how can the situation be avoided? By employing
user experience design, or UXD
with UXD you're designing for the user
and not for your own preferences and needs. As a UX designer
it's your job to look at the entire experience holistically
and make sure that the user's needs are always met. UX designers
must be advocates for the user. Your goal is to provide balance
between the client's needs and the user's needs.
So, how do you always incorporate the user's need into the design?
The UX designer includes user's needs from the very beginning of the project.
Let's revisit the widget. The first step in making the widget user-friendly
is for the UX designer to observe potential customers using similar
products
and going about their daily lives. So
the UX designers find users that could potentially use the widget
or are using a competitor's widget then
the UX designer performs either or both non-participatory
or participatory observations.
After the UX designers gather information from their observations, they
use the information to generate personas. A persona
is a written illustration of a fictional character who is a
representation up one type of user.
These personas help UX designers understand who they're designing their
widgets for.
Although the personas are fictional, the information used to create them is not.
Once the UX designers have information from the client
and the personas, they can begin creating the prototype.
UX designers create many different prototypes.
Depending on the time frame and budget, UX designers draw sketches to develop fully
functioning applications.
These prototypes are then used for testing. Testing is the most important
part of UXD.
There are two types of testing: usability
and user experience. Usability tests
ask the users to complete specific tasks to ensure the widget is functional.
User experience testing... well
test the user's experience while using the widget. Both types of tests need to
happen many times during the development phase of any product to ensure your
widget is usable
and provides a great experience for your users. Based on the UX testing results
the UX designer and the client can go back to their original designs
and make changes to the widget to improve usability
and user experience.
You have completed: What is User Experience Design?