“User experience is everything that touches a product …more than just an app it’s the experience of the whole system around it.” – Don Norman, who coined the term ‘User Experience’ When you enter your destination into a rideshare app or check your social media notifications, you’re interacting with a screen — but also, with user experience designers. Better known as UX designers, these technology professionals map out your experience long before you had it, structuring it to feel as natural and intuitive as possible. That’s their job: to craft easily navigable digital interfaces. UX design roles vary greatly, and there are numerous UX design specializations available, such as information architecture and communication design. Every designer, especially on the smaller UX design teams, does a little bit of everything. We have broken down UX design roles into roughly four components: Researching Ideating Designing Communicating With this blog, we hope to make you understand how a UX designer can contribute to your business. Below are the ways UX designers can help your business, and how to spot a real one: … #1 Researching A UX designer’s goal as a researcher is to truly understand a user’s needs, motivations, and empathize with them to improve or create a new product. The research responsibilities included everything from reviewing quantitative and qualitative survey results to conducting user testing. User testing, also known as usability testing, entails learning about the user experience by simply observing how users complete key tasks within an app or platform. The process can reveal points of confusion in a more granular way than the interview. User testing frequently begins with defining testing objectives, identifying the key interfaces to investigate. For example, a homepage or a profile page – and the key learning objectives for each interface. They then create the script. This is the standardized monologue that UX designers read before starting a user test to lay out the ground rules and introduce the task. User interviews can also be used in user research. Aside from asking “What do you like about this product?”, they also ask users about their industry experiences to know what they want, which are not related to the products they’re researching. How do they help your products with research? -They make your product better by identifying problems you didn’t think existed by interviewing users and understanding their pain points when using your product, building a loyal user base and better product. -They assist in visualizing how your product would solve niche problems before it is even launched, allowing you to pitch your story to investors more effectively by using storyboards to demonstrate how it would work and how it would solve core market problems. #2 Ideating Scheduling time for ideation is essential to the UX designer’s process — and the creative process in general. This is how the research findings are transformed into design concepts. There are two stages to brainstorming. The first step is research analysis, during which designers zero in on specific user problems. This can be as simple as data science. In some cases, UX designers divide a sample of users into categories or types and storyboard the typical user experience for each. Along the way, they identify common “pain points” for each type, such as a final “purchase” button that one type consistently misses. After a UX designer has decided on a problem to tackle, the second stage of ideation begins – brainstorming. What are all of the possible solutions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? This isn’t exactly “pulling ideas out of thin air.” To ensure consistency of user encounters, UX designers draw inspiration from wireframes for their brand’s other features. They also integrate UI/UX trends. How do they help your products with ideating? -They can suggest new features that generate revenue or solve problems, thereby increasing sales and users. -They eliminate guesswork by appropriately grouping products or features using card sorting, reducing the need for users to search or believe that you do not offer that service, resulting in sales loss. #3 Designing A UX designer creates a rough draft of a concept during this phase. The level of fidelity, or faithfulness, with which they have been tasked determines their current state. A low-fidelity design is known as a wireframe, and a high-fidelity design is called a prototype. The former is more akin to a blueprint or outline of “the site’s structure.” The latter has some interactive features and fleshed-out visuals and is close to completion. Typically, UX designers concentrate on wireframes. Designers typically employ software such as Axure, Invision, and Sketch. Wireframing is essentially the process of positioning logos, menus, and buttons on high-trafficked pages. In this stage, actual imagery is kept to a minimum. Designers frequently look into the internal style guide while prototyping. This document specifies a brand’s appearance in terms of colors, spacing, and font, and its specifications can be quite detailed. How do they help your products with designing? -They ensure that your customers are not confused and leave your website by ensuring that layouts and interactions are consistent across other market websites or apps, thereby maintaining user familiarity with the product even if they switch from a competitor. -They help in speed up signups and checkouts, resulting in lower user abandonment, while also making things intuitive, so people don’t have to think about what to do. #4 Communicating Wireframes and prototypes are frequently presented to key stakeholders, which can include internal teams and external clients. Presentations are typically used to demonstrate how a new product will work and to justify changes. UX designers should ideally be able to trace features and formatting back to research and analysis. Specifically for UX designers, “There is a lot of interaction with developers to ensure that your ideas can be implemented within their timeframe. They have a completely different set of priorities and obligations.” UX designers sit down with the developers to give each other updates on their development progress and to provide each other feedback. One of the main purposes is also to make sure they’ve exported all their SVG’s properly into Zeplin, which is a tool UI/UX designers use to communicate with developers. There they can fetch all the assets they need, from spacing to UI components, which makes me accountable for all the design decisions, and forces them to think as a pixel-perfect designer. During these touchpoints, UX designers communicate their design decisions and the rationale behind it all. Nothing is arbitrary in design. If your users understand the choices you’ve presented to them, your mapping of elements, and your interactions; then you are successful. How do they help your products with communication/collaboration? -They select the best approach by using wire-frames and prototyping to quickly test different decisions, avoiding the need to launch a product only to discover it’s a nightmare for you and your users, saving you a lot of money. -They validate your product or their own decisions, by having actual data that shows why they did this and why it’s better, thus eliminating guesswork or any preconceived ideas. Hopefully, you now have a good idea of what a UX designer has to deliver or communicate with stakeholders. If you’re thinking ‘we do not have enough experience to deal with this or “what if I don’t have enough time”, contact us to get in touch with our UI/UX experts. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our UI/UX designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.