Do UX The Right Way (PART1)
Doing UX the right way is understanding the users.
User experience is centred on the users. As UX designers, we don’t just go straight to design, we try to understand the users’ problems and find a solution for them. This process isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. UX design is iterative. It entails putting oneself in the position of the users.
User experience keeps the users at the heart of everything that is being designed. User experience design begins at the very start of an idea and it goes all the way through the lifetime of your product.
5 key stages inform the UX design. They are:
- Discover
2. Describe and Define your concept
3. Design the behaviour
4. Develop your design
5. Release your product.
For this part, we’d be talking about the first three.
- Discover:
Learn more about your users. The best way to ensure success is to base your decisions around actual data from real users. Before creating a solution to a problem, UX designers discover who needs the product. They also discover other relevant products like the solution they want to create and what can be improved on it.
This process entails researching the users, discovering other problems the users don’t know they have and creating a persona to understand the users. Personas make the design process less complex and help designers to achieve the goal of creating a good UX for the target users.
2. Describe Phase:
This phase entails defining the main goals and requirements. The user research gathered will help you as a designer clearly define the goal of a product or website.
Brainstorming also happens at this phase. You start to use your persona profile and feelings to frame questions that the product will solve.
Here, you come up with different possibilities that will make you tweak or clarify your original concept, discover a different problem or a better opportunity entirely. The most important part of this phase is to be open-minded and think as broadly as you can about which different possibilities might meet all or part of your goals and that of the personas.
Define your goals, brainstorm ideas and define your requirements.
3. Designing the experience:
After clearly defining and breaking down the goals, the next phase is to create steps that a user needs to carry out. These steps are called a User Journey. The skill for this is to think logically and be very clear about what’s necessary and in what order things happen. You can create alternate paths that help when things go wrong or when there are multiple choices.
These steps are iterative. It is absolutely normal to go over the goals of the project and the user behaviour. The processes are as important as the product. It is imperative you go through them so as to keep the users at the centre of your design.