What is user experience design?
User experience design (UXD) is about how a person interacts with your website. A user might visit hundreds of websites in their life, and each of the websites influences the way they use other sites on the internet. There are five primary steps that can be considered when analyzing how users interact with your site: planning, conducting analysis, creating a mockup, getting feedback, and testing and refinement. The following steps outline each stage in more depth to provide an understanding of what UXD is all about.
User experience (UX) is the relationship between a product and the person using it. UX design focuses on building products that someone can easily use and enjoy using.
“User experience design is about supporting user’s needs, but making sure not to distract them from the overall experience of the product.
The story you’re telling about a product should speak exactly to the intended audience with no unnecessary jargon or imagery.
There is definitely a sweet spot between supporting the process and overcomplicating it! Research, trying, testing, iterating, and testing again. That’s UX design—your job is never done. The story you’re presenting is always developing along with your products.” — Hazel Watts, UX Content Specialist.
What does a UX designer do?
A user experience (UX) designer makes sure a product is learnable and usable for the end-user. A UX designer works from the very beginning of any product process to ensure product teams are building products that are conscious of their users, their needs, and pain points.
A UX designer works with branding, navigation, content, and product functions to ensure all of these elements are tied together to create an end result that’s joyful and fluid.
UX designers are responsible for more than just the product experience and product lifecycle—they’re key players in the entire customer lifecycle.
The decisions a UX designer makes influences if a user is attracted to, willing to pay for, and can use a product in the first place. Updates and tweaks a UX designer makes to a live product can positively affect customer retention rates and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
What’s the difference between a UX and a UI designer?
UI design is a little different because it focuses on human-computer interaction. This can be anything from a desktop web page to the usability of an app screen on a handheld device.
User interface designers (also known as interaction designers) focus solely on the interface of a product, not the flow between interfaces or the user’s experience going through the journey.
User interface design works closely with user experience design. Together, UX and UI designers conduct user research, measure usability, and are constantly testing designs for any stand-out success to replicate or error to fix.
A UI designer usually has some kind of understanding of front-end development and graphic design. They focus on visual assets, while a UX designer will focus on all parts of the user experience.
What skills do UX designers need?
Let’s break this section into two parts; hard skills and soft skills needed in UX design.
There are certain practical skill sets a designer needs to learn to become a UX designer. At the same time, a UX designer needs to practice certain soft skills to become a successful UX designer.
Hard skills UX designers need
You need quite a few hard skills to earn the title of UX designer. Most of these skill sets you will learn in a UX design course or degree.
- UX Research
- Wireframing & prototyping
- Visual communication
- Interactive design
- Design thinking
- User flows
- Interaction design
- Testing designs
- Decision mapping
- Information architecture
- Mood boarding
- Visual & UI design
- Coding—up for debate, more on this later
It’s not easy to conquer all of these UX design skills, and it’s certainly not easy to become an expert in all of them. UX design courses—linked later in this piece—tend to have you specialize in a few specific areas of design and give you the basics of all the above.
Discover how to ask the right user research questions to get valuable insights and make better design decisions.
Soft skills UX designers need
To help us answer this question, we spoke to UX Engineer, Fabio Rose, to get a better idea of some of the soft skills a UX designer needs to succeed in the industry.
“For me, there are three core soft skills every UX designer needs.
1. Empathy: UX design leads with users in mind. You’ll need to investigate and completely understand the motivations, anxieties, needs, and problems of the people who will use your design. If you want the result to be functional and meaningful, it needs to be built with empathy. Forget about yourself. Listen to and understand what your users want.
2. Organization: UX design is like a puzzle. You can’t miss a single piece of research if you want it to be complete. Put all of those (user research) pieces together in a way that makes the most sense for the goal of the product, and you’ll have a successful design. Good organization is essential to get you there.
3. Curiosity: UX designers need to stay curious. If you want to discover that last piece to your UX design puzzle that ties everything together in harmony, a certain amount of curiosity is needed. This means you need to be comfortable in challenging assumptions and looking for alternative solutions to those that seem the most logical.” — Fabio Rose, UX Engineer.
Do user experience designers need to code?
In short, no. User experience designers don’t need to code, although it’s definitely a nice skill to have.
Even if a UX designer doesn’t code themselves, they’ll be working with engineers and developers that code for them, so it’s useful to understand coding capabilities.
By speaking the language, designers can better translate the feasibility of a user experience design concept.
Most user experience designers have basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Although, they haven’t necessarily learned it to become a UX designer, more so because of past experience or because they want to collaborate better with their engineering colleagues.
Today, we’re seeing more and more SaaS models popping up to support ‘no-code,’ or ‘low-code’ user experience design methods, so the demand for coding expertise in UX design jobs is thinning out.
Which types of projects are UX designers involved in?
UX designers are often asked to contribute towards business development projects that are not traditionally within a designer’s scope of work. This is largely because they often provide a unique, empathetic lens that other core business roles don’t tend to focus on.
Let’s explore some of the projects you could (and should) involve a UX designer in.
Customer retention
UX designers can provide a unique input when it comes to customer retention. They often have specific data sets that can pinpoint problem areas that need improvement and can help retain customers by reducing these friction points.
Specifically, user experience designers can help with:
- App design
- Product design
Lead Generation
Any lead generation project should include a UX designer’s input. Whether that’s qualitative input and guidance, or the actual design of a lead gen flow, user experience designers can give your generation machine the best chance possible at success.
A few lead generation methods to include a UX designer in are:
- Landing pages
- Email flows
- Website design
- Blogs, Guides & Case Studies
- User Research
Internal processes and systems
Lastly, user experience designers can go beyond your customers, users, product, or service. They can also help towards strategies that help keep employees happy and retain staff.
By using a combination of soft and hard skills, user experience designers can offer support, guidance, and technical design solutions when it comes to building new processes, systems, and communication methods.
What UX Designers do goes Beyond UI Design
“User Experience Design” is often used interchangeably with terms such as “User Interface Design” and “Usability”. However, while usability and user interface (UI) design are important aspects of UX design, they are subsets of it – UX design covers a vast array of other areas, too. A UX designer is concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. It is a story that begins before the device is even in the user’s hands.
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service – from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
— Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience”
Products that provide great user experience (e.g., the iPhone) are thus designed with not only the product’s consumption or use in mind but also the entire process of acquiring, owning and even troubleshooting it. Similarly, UX designers don’t just focus on creating products that are usable; we concentrate on other aspects of the user experience, such as pleasure, efficiency and fun, too. Consequently, there is no single definition of a good user experience. Instead, a good user experience is one that meets a particular user’s needs in the specific context where he or she uses the product.
UX Designers consider the Why, What and How of Product Use
As a UX designer, you should consider the Why, What and How of product use. The Why involves the users’ motivations for adopting a product, whether they relate to a task they wish to perform with it or to values and views which users associate with the ownership and use of the product. The What addresses the things people can do with a product—its functionality. Finally, the How relates to the design of functionality in an accessible and aesthetically pleasant way. UX designers start with the Why before determining the What and then, finally, the How in order to create products that users can form meaningful experiences with. In software designs, you will need to ensure the product’s “substance” comes through an existing device and offers a seamless, fluid experience.
UX Design is User-Centered
Since UX design encompasses the entire user journey, it’s a multidisciplinary field – UX designers come from a variety of backgrounds such as visual design, programming, psychology and interaction design. To design for human users also means you have to work with a heightened scope regarding accessibility and accommodating many potential users’ physical limitations, such as reading small text. A UX designer’s typical tasks vary, but often include user research, creating personas, designing wireframes and interactive prototypes as well as testing designs. These tasks can vary greatly from one organization to the next, but they always demand designers to be the users’ advocate and keep the users’ needs at the center of all design and development efforts. That’s also why most UX designers work in some form of user-centered work process, and keep channeling their best-informed efforts until they address all of the relevant issues and user needs optimally.
User-centered design is an iterative process where you take an understanding of the users and their context as a starting point for all design and development.
How to become a UX designer
As we have seen, UX design is an extremely multifaceted field. Working in UX requires a highly diverse skillset coupled with a passion for user-centric design. A career in UX can be very varied, challenging and financially rewarding; according to Glassdoor, the average salary for a User Experience Designer in the United States is $97,460.
There is no standard background or path that leads to a career in UX. However, the best UX designers typically share certain qualities and attributes, including:
- An ability to think both creatively and analytically
- A strong gift for empathy and a user-first mindset
- An interest in technology and how humans interact with it
- Strong problem-solving skills
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate
Conclusion
UX design is becoming more and more important on the web. The more you understand UX principles, the better of a designer you will be.