5 seconds – that’s how long it takes for the user of your website or app to form an opinion on it. His feelings are what determines whether you will achieve your goals. This is where the experience design enters, i.e. designing an app or website in a way that meets expectations of clients.
What is UX?
UX literally means “user experience”. It’s impressions that you provide him with during his use of your product. In fact, we can talk about UX wherever some interaction occurs – mainly between man and technology, but also between people. UX can be using a website, system, but also a service provided by another person.
UX is about customer satisfaction. So that the interaction with your product was convenient and didn’t force him to act in an unusual way. In a word: it should be nice and easy.
So, we agreed that you strive for a good user experience. Meaning what?
Good UX is unnoticeable
Look at it this way: when you use, for example, internet banking and you have to think about every subsequent step, it means that the system’s creator didn’t take care of proper UX. As a result, the process is demanding, hard to understand and requires serious focus. You can easily point out what should be streamlined and improved. You remember every obstacle that you’ve faced, you feel frustrated and that you wasted too much time.
On the other hand, if you order food online, not thinking about the way you do it at all – it means one thing: a really good UX. The portal is simple, intuitive and well designed. It’s thanks to this that you can use it without thinking about the whole process and without stress. And this is the effect that you want to achieve in the case of your website or software.
In fact, UX is affected by everything, from website’s code to the content. Good UX is easy navigation, proper typography, transparent menu and correctly formatted texts. It’s also friendly error messages – through which you explain in a simple way what happened, why and what the user can do now.
An example of a friendly 404 error page on a platform Dropbox
What is UX design how it differs from UX?
UX is the achieved effect – user experience. Whereas UX design is the initial stage. Designing experiences covers the whole process of planning and programming the impact that you want to make as well as impressions that you plan to evoke. It includes studying needs, finding possible problems and fixing them. In other words: designing user’s experiences is about making his contact with the product friendly. Without stress, uncertainty and negative emotions.
Who is UX designer? What does his job consist of?
I like to imagine world, where officials have competences of UX designers. I’m sure it would be prettier! Why? Because UX designer is someone, who strives to make life easier – for himself and the users. UX designer has one mission: to prepare and optimize an app or website in a way that it generates pleasant experiences. Therefore, he must be able to predict, plan and pay attention to the details. And to poke holes in everything – but only in order to fill them effectively.
What is important in UX design?
- Optimization – you strive to make the operation simple and intuitive.
- Empathy – you must be able to get into the role of the product’s user.
- Adaptation – everything you do, you do for your target group, not for yourself. Your audience must be in the centre of attention.
- Research and tests – in this way you determine, what do the users need.
- Proven solution – good UX doesn’t need to be innovative, usually what’s already known works much better.
- Elimination of difficulties – you need to recognise all potential problems and find appropriate solutions to them.
- Fulfilment of goals – good UX allows you to effectively fulfil goals: sell, acquire customers or build an expert’s image.
Summary
UX design is a process that helps you take care of good UX, i.e. suitable user impressions. Thanks to designing experiences you can program, as early as at the stage of creating an app or a website, what impact it should make. Good UX is based on proven solutions and is unnoticeable. It means simplicity, intuitive operation and adaptation to the user’s expectations. It also helps you fulfil specific goals, such as sales, acquiring customers or building an image.
Want to learn more about UX design? Write to me!