What is User Experience Design?
The concept of user experience is capturing the feelings of a user when they interact with a product, service, or system. This includes websites, applications, technology, and any other human-interaction device. As a user experience designer, our goal is to consider your needs when interacting with or utilizing specific technologies.
For example, let’s imagine you are utilizing D2L at the end of the semester to look at your final grade, but don’t seem to find it under the ‘Grades’ section, and become frustrated having to manually calculate your grade through assignment scores and syllabus information. This is a bad user experience.
How can a User Experience Designer make this better?
As User Experience Designers (also known as UX Designers) our job is to make navigation and clarity understandable and digestible for our user group (students for this instance). In order to fix this issue and improve user experience, we would make clarity and navigation for students easier, allowing students to see their final grades on the course homepage for concise and quick information.
How do you ensure a good user experience?
As a student studying Experience Architecture at MSU, the interdisciplinary topics cover accessibility, design, content/rhetoric, marketing, psychology, and programming which equips students with the necessary tools and information to tackle creating a good experience. There are countless considerations UX Designers take into consideration before designing, which is testing and research.
The UX Process is more complex than it seems
As someone outside of UX might believe jumping to solutions can assist users, designers most likely will disagree. There is a large factor of research and tests involved while conducting user experience research through processes of making user personas of potential users and their experiences using the system. This practice allows designers to step into the shoes of their users and consider all avenues and identities users might have from disabilities, language barriers, environments, etc. From there, designers can formulate the problem of the system and begin conducting research through:
- User interviews: The interviewing of potential users and gathering information regarding current problems they face using the product.
- User journey mapping: The process of creating a flow of where you imagine users will navigate throughout the system/product.
- Wireframing: Your system and putting together elements from the research you received into your designs.
- Prototyping: This is a “final” version of your design mockup.
- User-testing: This is the process of testing your finalized mockup with real users to identify any roadblocks or usability issues while interacting.
Why is it important?
The presentation of a successful user experience can leave an impression on your users and can assist them in many ways than one. The world is full of diversity and identities, therefore, for example, simply helping redesign an essential government website might assist users tremendously who are looking for government assistance.
The goal is to solve a problem a user is having, which can therefore be beneficial for brands and organizations looking to grow and expand audiences, therefore user experience design not only caters to psychological needs but also satisfies marketing objectives.
Why do I do it?
I appreciate the blend of genres that user experience/architecture tackles, which fulfills every interest that I have within a career. I get to practice designing, creativity, marketing/researching, intuitive decision-making, and teamwork. While UX is a relatively new career, I believe UX designers are essential for humanity and ensuring all products are usable to every individual.