I started reading an article from CareerFoundry about UX design, and I would like to document my understanding of the article. Dr. Donald Norman, an Apple electrical engineer and cognitive scientist in the 1990s, created the word "UX." He is regarded as a pioneer in user-centered design, emphasizing the need to create with the end user's wants and goals in mind. The entire impression a user has when engaging with a product or service in a certain setting is referred to as the user experience, abbreviated as UX. The quality of this encounter might range from extremely pleasurable to quite aggravating. While user experience (UX) is commonly connected with digital products such as websites and applications, its scope goes beyond the digital sphere.
THE UX DESIGN PROCESS
The design process is typically divided into four different phases, namely: research, design, testing, and implementation. Let's look at each phase in detail.
Research
Each design process starts with research. However, in the field of UX design, research begins with the user. You must comprehend what your users require, how they think, and how they conduct themselves to communicate with them during your research. After receiving the brief about a new project, the designer will have to make a comprehensive competitive analysis of the existing products out there. They proceed to carry out surveys and interviews with prospective target users to identify their needs, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
Then we move to research analysis, which is done to analyze the data and gain insights about the products about to be designed. The process involved would be data organization, data analysis, data visualization, identification of common themes and patterns, prioritizing and summarizing impacts, and then validation and review.
Then you create a fictional but realistic representation of your prospective users, known as the user persona. That is done by identifying their needs, goals, and pain points, which should align with the research objectives and research analysis. After this, you can look into the steps that the user will fulfill while navigating the products, which leads us to the creation of user flows.
User flows are like steps or paths that a user will need to navigate the product to satisfy his needs. Finalizing this stage means we are ready for a digital representation of the products, which is known as the wireframes.
A wireframe is similar to a blueprint in that it shows the layout of the design and how it will function. A prototype is a scaled-down version of the final product—a simulation or sample version that allows you to test your ideas and designs before they are built. They tend to start as basic, then low fidelity, and then, after a few tests and feedback, they reach their completion.
Before development, the products have to have undergone some usability testing by the users, so improvements can be made where they are found lacking and for real-time feedback from the user about their experience. then the design is ready to be sent off to the developers for development.
Aspects of UX Design
There are four different aspects of UX design, namely:
Experience Strategy (ExS)
User Research (UR)
Information Architecture (IA)
Interaction Design (IxD)
and UX designers can decide to specialize in any one of the areas necessary; there are also other specialized areas aside from the above-mentioned:
UX Writer
UI/UX Designer
Voice Designer
UX Developer
Important Skills Needed for a UX Designer
There are soft skills required,
Communication
Empathy
Organization
while there are hard skills required,
User research
Information Architecture
Wireframing and Prototyping
Important Tips on Portfolio
To put yourself out there and exhibit yourself as a UX designer, you need to showcase your work in the form of a case study, showcasing your flow from the problem to the solutions, how you made informed decisions, and what influenced how you made those decisions.
There are different websites to showcase your work, such as Dribble, Behance, etc.
That wraps up my write-up based on what I learned from the article written by CareerFoundry. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.