Understanding User Experience Design (UXD)
Today I will share with you what I have learned and understood about User Experience Design.
What is UX Design?
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.”
In other words, UX design is the process of designing (digital or physical) products that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with. It’s about enhancing the experience that people have while interacting with your product, and making sure they find value in what you’re providing.
According to Donald Norman, User-centered design means working with your users throughout the project.
UX Core Principles
- Understand and address the core problems
- Be People-Centered
- Use an Activity-Centered Systems Approach
- Use Rapid Iterations of Prototyping and Testing
UX Design Process
Most designers are familiar with the concept of “design thinking” as a UX process. This process has five stages in it: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Most design processes originate from this concept.
Applying design thinking to UX Design gives us the following phases;
- Discovery
- improving
- Testing
- Prototyping
Today we will be talking about the discovery phase;
Discovery
Is a preliminary phase in the UX-design process that involves researching the problem, framing the problem(s) to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next.
Discoveries are important to setting design projects off in the right direction by focusing on the right problems and consequently building the right thing.
A discovery should start with a broad objective such as: “Go find out about this problem, just how big it is, and what the opportunities might be.”
A discovery should result in the following:
Understanding of users: User research helps us to understand who the users are, and how they are affected by a particular problem as well as what they need, desire, and value from a solution.
Understanding of the problem to be solved and the opportunity: Investigative work should help you understand how and why the problem(s) occur, what effect the problem has on the users and organization.
Shared Vision: Work with stakeholders to understand overarching business objectives and desired outcomes and get answers to questions such as ‘what do we want to achieve?’.
The Outcome of a Discovery
A detailed understanding of the problem and what outcomes to aim for, as well as where to focus efforts.
Discovery isn’t about producing outputs for their own sake. However, the following might be produced to help the team organize learnings about the problem space and users:
● A finalized problem statement: a description of the problem, backed up with evidence that details how big it is and why it’s important
● A service blueprint
● User-journey maps
● User-needs statements
● Personas
● High-level concepts or wireframes (for exploring in the next phase)
Summary
Discovery is a preliminary phase of a design project. It can be initiated by many different kinds of problems, involving different size teams, and many research or workshop activities. However, all discoveries strive to gain insight into a problem space, as well as to achieve consensus on desired outcomes.
We will continue to the Improving stage tomorrow.
