The bones of design
What is UX design?
UX stands for user experience. UX design is designing for user experiences. Don Norman coined the term user experience in the 90s when he was an electrical engineer and cognitive scientist at Apple. He created the user centered design process which places the needs of the user first and foremost at every stage of the product life cycle. UX is all about discovering problems and solving those problems for users. A great design is an intuitive design. It should be so easy to use that the user doesn’t even need to think about it.
UX design isn’t art. UX design is what can be found behind the visuals. It isn’t about making things look beautiful. Although a visually appealing product makes it more enjoyable to use, UX design isn’t responsible for the pretty graphics, color choices, or typography. That is considered the visual design or the user interface design (UI) and is handled by the UI designer. The flashy or entertaining animations are also an enjoyable part of a design, but those are the job of the motion designer. So many designers are responsible for the look and feel of a product, but it is the UX designer who is responsible for the first step in the design of a product. Great UX should be useful, usable and desirable.
When creating great user experiences, it is very important to think about everything that affects the user’s interaction with a product. It entails answering questions like who, what, when, where, why and how about the product’s use. UX design is responsible for creating the logic behind the design. This is why I would say it can be called the bones of the product.
UX designers must ask a lot of questions. These questions can be answered via methods like user interviews, surveys, and ethnographic studies. Psychology plays a very big role in this line of work, and designers must possess quite a deal of empathy. UX designers are responsible for using their research data to come up with better product solutions that create positive emotional responses for the user. A designer will look at behaviors, patterns and habits to make an experience better. I think Liz Sanders the founder of Make Tools said it best by explaining that you can’t design experiences, but you can design for them.
But I will argue that there is no such thing as experience design. Experiencing is in people and you can’t design it for someone else. You can, however, design for experiencing.
UX design, like I mentioned earlier, is the bones of the design. It involves creating wireframes, task flows, and sitemaps, as opposed to UI, which are the visuals the user interacts with. Designers use wireframes to create prototypes of their designs for testing. UX designers must do a lot of usability testing and sometimes iterate extensively upon their designs in order to make them as easy to use as possible. No guessing is involved in a great design. It is all about trial and error. When designers conduct research and testing, they are able to use data to come up with better product solutions that will best meet the needs of the user.
Not only do designers need to learn about users, designers must also take business needs into account. A great UX design is where the business needs and the user needs intersect. The best user experience optimizes both of these needs. Designers must be able to present and show their ideas to other team members as well as stakeholders and be able to validate their decisions with the data they gathered in research. Companies can lose a lot of money if they just start designing from the business side and perspective. They must understand the way the user thinks to create a great user experience and simultaneously achieve their goals.
UX can be coined the bones of a design. It involves the research and user testing that goes into a product to make it more user friendly. Products should elicit a positive user response. The best user experiences not only solve problems for users and make their lives easier, they also take business needs into account and help businesses to achieve their goals.
