Like Ben Le Ralph said, "I always find it difficult explaining what I do as a UX Designer to my friends, family and sometimes even co-workers. At parties, with relatives and with the odd customs official I often fall back to ‘I design how websites work’, but that is an incomplete definition and understates my real suite of skills. In the same way plumbers don’t just unblock toilets, and being an electrician is far more technical than changing lightbulbs, UX designers do far more than sketch out where a button should appear on a web page."
I've always admired a great designs especially in Graphics Design, but the most intriguing one is when I see a design created to interact with humans emotions or better, yet we say a design created by putting its users' in mind.
So without further ado, let's take a look at what I've learned so far.
What is UX Design?
UX Design is all about helping people and solving problems. Think of UX Designer as a licensed simplifier coming up with elegant thoughts-free solutions to the problems of tomorrow. So in a nutshell,
UX Design is the studying user behavior and understanding user motivations with the goal of designing better digital experience.
As a UX Designer, every day there is something new, whether that's interviewing users (User Research), creating personas, sketching up a new set of wireframes or testing a prototype, all of this is part of the UX Design process.
UX Design Process
User Research
As I will call it, the Golden Rule of UX Design. Ultimately, User Research ensures that we're designing with the users' in mind.
As a UX designer, a user-centered approach is absolutely crucial; you need to understand what your users need, how they think, and how they behave. It’s therefore really important to engage with your users directly and figure out how they tick!
When creating a product (physical or digital) it always starts with a user in mind. Research is essential as it helps us understand the problem we are trying to solve. It enables us to identify pain-points and challenges, validate or invalidate our assumptions, find patterns and commonalities across our target user groups, and shed plenty of light on our users’ needs and objectives.
User Personas
A user persona is a fictional but realistic representation of a set of target users based on their goals, needs, and behaviors (all discovered during the research phase!). A user persona is an extremely valuable tool in the UX design process, as it reminds designers and other stakeholders that they’re designing for real people.
Personas help to humanize different target user groups? This helps the designer to build empathy with the user and to prioritize key features and design decisions based on real user data.
Wireframes & Prototype
A wireframe is like a blueprint, demonstrating the layout of the design and how it will function. A prototype is essentially a scaled-down version of the final product—a simulation or sample version, which allows us to test our ideas and designs before we get them developed. Wireframes and prototypes tend to start off as rather basic, low-fidelity sketches, and then, based on feedback and initial testing, will evolve into detailed mockups that closely resemble the final design.
User Testing
Testing is a fundamental part of the UX designer’s job, and a core component of the overall UX design process. The most common type of testing for UX designers is usability testing, which is a technique used to evaluate how intuitive and user-friendly a particular design is.
After several iterations of prototyping and testing, my design is ready for a visual makeover. This is where the UI designer comes in…
In addition…
Embarking on this journey of becoming a UX designer has now been opening my eyes to a lot in this world of UX Design (UxD) thanks to my ongoing bootcamp with Friends of Figma Africa, really appreciate this tremendous opportunity.