The goal of user experience (UX) is to have a thorough awareness of people, their needs, values, skills, and constraints. It also considers the project management team’s corporate goals and objectives. The goal of UX best practices is to enhance how users interact with and perceive your product and any connected services. The UX/UI experience applies to enterprise and startup alike and will work on any custom software.
Making sure people value what you are giving them is at the heart of user experience. Peter Morville represents this through his User Experience Honeycomb.
He notes that in order for there to be a meaningful and valuable user experience, information must be:
Useful: Your content should be original and fulfill a need
Usable: Site must be easy to use. The visual elements must be compelling.
Desirable: Image, identity, brand, and other design elements are used to evoke emotion and appreciation
Findable: Content needs to be navigable and relocatable onsite and offsite. The product design must be unique and engaging.
Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities. This includes th visual
Credible: Users must trust and believe what you tell them. A good graphic designer – in house or via staff augmentation model – can help with this.
Focusing on users throughout the design process is the most important of all UX design concepts. By using the word “user experience,” it is obvious that the focus of your effort must be on enhancing how people interact with your product or service. Software solutions and custom software development, in a house team or outsourcing models, will benefit your design long term.
Consequently, you must discover what features people seek in a design (through user testing and other methods).
You could think a design is fantastic, but keep in mind that you are not the user. The design process might be intimidating for rookie UX designers who are just beginning their internships or are in junior roles.
Knowing your role in the process is important for a number of reasons because creating involves a lot of labor.
First of all, you must employ unique tools for each step. Second, knowing your design phase enables you to formulate the appropriate user research questions. For example, there is no purpose in testing a button’s color while you are still deciding where it should go in the design.
But what does UX actually mean? Let’s review:
First of all, if you have purchased the product or have benefited from the service, you are the user. You are experiencing when you interact with a product, service, or company. Ultimately, most companies want to deliver a great experience with their products or services. To understand what makes the experience great, you need to define what it means from the user’s perspective.
What makes an experience “good” hinges on whether it was successful at solving a real problem or provided users with actual value. This is the core distinction between art and design: Whereas art can be aesthetically pleasing, good design must have utility. Having the aesthetics is not enough. Thus, a good user experience is one that enables the user’s interaction to be effective.
The best way to understand the basics of UI and UX design is to fully understand the basic concepts of website design.
This knowledge carries over UI design (designing buttons, typography, white space, drop shadow, working with colour combinations, gradients, different kinds of grids, layouts etc).
Having good understanding and solid foundation in visual and web design is essential to become a skilled UI/UX designer. Below I’ve highlighted some of the basic and key design principles that you need become familiar with (If you’re not already):
1. Color: Great three-part series on color theory — color vocabulary, fundamentals and the psychology of colors. Color Theory for Designers
2. Grid systems: What they are, and how they can be applied to your design process. Building Better UI Designs With Layout Grids
3. Composition & Balance: Learn to how balance a composition. Design Principles: Compositional, Symmetrical And Asymmetrical Balance
4. Typography: Better Web Type is an easy-to-follow web typography email course for web designers & web developers. Created by Matej Latin
5. Contrast: Using contrast to organize information, build hierarchy and create focus. Principles of design: contrast
Another very important aspect in becoming a UI/UX designer is understanding the process, methods, philosophy that are used in UX design process. Generally speaking, the UX design process is very flexible — there is no strict rules or order of phases to follow. In addition to that various companies, teams might have different methods of implementing their own design process. Although I’m going to give you idea of a general and common UX design process called Design Thinking.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is the process of designing product from perspective how it will be understood and used my users rather than requiring users to adopt their behaviors in order to learn how to use the system.
The goal is to develop useful & valuable products based on user needs, not the other way around. Design Thinking occurs in the following five stages.
The best relationships between product management and UX design start by performing user research and developing use cases collaboratively. This creates a unified foundation as each party goes off to work on their own areas of focus and ensures that the user experience is fully informed by the business objectives and customer needs.
Product managers can also benefit from increasing their UX education and incorporating UX design into their overall approach. This ensures the strategy they set and vision they paint takes the user experience into full account, which is essential to the product’s ultimate success or failure.