Do you want to start your own UX project but you are not sure where to start? This short guide will help you!
What is UX?
User Experience (UX) refers the interactions that a user has with your product or service. Do they feel exasperated and confused? Or satisfied? Think about when you use a website that loads quickly, is easy to use, and helps you find exactly what you’re looking for without struggles… or when you use a mobile app to order coffee in the morning and it’s so straightforward and intuitive that you can do it half-asleep. — those are good examples of good UX.
UX is everywhere…
People usually associate UX with website/app development only, but UX is everywhere. When using a supermarket self-checkout machine which walks you smoothly through every step; or when you are about to make instant noodles and the packaging is designed to make eating a quick, easy, and low-effort experience.
What are the benefits of a good UX?
User Satisfaction: When a product is easy to use and enjoyable, people is more likely to recommend it and keep using it, hence it is important to make sure that your users have a positive experience every time they interact with your product.
User engagement, productivity & efficiency: Well-designed user experiences can significantly boost users productivity and efficiency enabling them to complete tasks faster and with less effort.
Business profits: A user-friendly website or app can increase conversions, meaning more visitors become customers. When a user feels satisfied with your product, their return is also more likely to happen, making them repeat purchases; this boosts customer loyalty. Eventually, a business can differentiate themselves from their rivals by emphasising UX.
Costs Reductions: Companies can cut down on support inquiries and customer complaints by simplifying their products.
Main principles of UX design
User Centricity: As a UX Designer, you should always put your users’ needs first and make decisions based on the information you have about them and what they expect, want, and need from your product.
Consistency: Achieve consistency both externally and internally. This means your product should function similarly to other products in the market, and every design element in your product should follow the same pattern, colour palette, font size, etc.
Simplicity: Do not add any information that is not necessary for the users, only focus on whatever is essential for them to be able to use your product or service. Otherwise it will distract them.
Accessibility: It is your responsibility as a designer to make sure that your product or service is usable by as many people as possible. For example, choosing to use high colour contrast in your product or service will make the text legible for users with visual impairments.
Feedback: In a concise and clear way, make sure to provide your users prompt and informative responses to the actions they perform, along with any type of help they might need during the user flow process. It is not the user’s responsibility to guess the consequences of the actions they take.
Hierarchy: Which elements of your interface have more relevance? Those should be bigger and have more contrast than the rest of the elements, so that the user focuses their attention in them.
Usability: Make sure your product is simple and easy to use, and satisfies your users’ needs.
Accessible design
Apart from these UX design principles, one of the most important concepts for a ux designer to keep in mind is accessibility. Apple’s Emoji library is an illustration of this, being inclusive for different types of relationships, physical capabilities, flags, etc. Embracing diversity among users will benefit your business as well because it will garner you more media attention and a better reputation.
The following are UX accessibility principles:
Empathy: understanding how your user feels and their thinking processes is an essential requirement when designing a user-friendly interface.
Inclusivity: all types of users should be able to use your product or service, regardless of their physical and cognitive abilities.
Context: your product or service should be adaptable to different situations and circumstances.
Control on Navigation: the designer must take into account different navigation options.
This gives rise to the idea of Universal Design (UD) which attempts to make environments and products that are as much as possible useable by everyone without the need for specialization or adaptation.
UX Methods
Whenever conducting a ux design project, the designer must follow a specific order. The stages are usually organised in the following way:
Research -> Define -> Ideate -> Prototype -> Test
In this section of the post, we dive into some methods that you can use as a designer at each stage of your project.
Research
This phase is also known as User Research stage or Empathise. This is because the main focus of it is to understand the users, their pain points and needs, so that then we can design our product or service according to those. It is important to remember that the users are our main focus. Here you can see some of the most commonly used user research methods:
Interview: A one-to-one interview is the perfect way to discuss early ideas.
Survey: Similar to an interview, but most of the questions in a survey are multiple choice rather than open ended, reason for which they are analysed in a quantitative way most of the times. They are carried online. They can provide us insights about user preferences and pain points.
Focus group: Similar to interviews too, except a focus group session is not done individually but in groups. It is a collaborative approach in which users discuss their issues with the product and any other type of feedback they wish to share related to it.
Contextual Inquiry: In a contextual inquiry, users are observed in their natural environment conditions and they are interviewed afterwards to talk about the process and any remaining feedback.
Card sorting: We give users a bunch of cards (which are features of our interface) and ask them to “group” them in a way that makes sense to them. This method is useful when we have decided the features we want our product to have, but we are unsure about how to organise the information. Note that there are two different types of card sorting: open or closed, depending on if the users are already given predefined groups into which they have to organise the cards to, or they are not given any groups and they need to come up with those themselves, respectively.
Define
Once the research has been completed, it is essential to organise our findings in a clear and concise manner, so that our research purpose and objectives are not confusing for the upcoming Design stage. The way to do this is by defining the found insights in one sentence, called Problem Statement.
Ideate
In this phase, designers usually come up with initial sketches for the product or service. Most of the times, brainstorming methods are conducted at this point. One of the most relevant methods is called the Crazy 8s.
Crazy 8s: Activity in which several UX Designers from the team brainstorm ideas for a specific feature of their product or service. They have to do 8 sketches in 8 minutes, with 1 minute per sketch. They can add annotations to those sketches and this is done in pen and paper. Once they are done, everyone needs to explain their 8 ideas to everyone else, and then they need to anonymously vote their favourite idea. The winner idea will be the selected one for the Design phase.
Doing “initial sketches” is also known as wireframing. Wireframing refers to creating basic visual representation of our product or service. More specifically, the focus is on Information Architecture (i.e. how our elements should be arranged and their main functionality) rather than on a detailed design or aesthetic UI.
Prototype
Once you have an idea of how you want your product to look like from a high-level perspective, you can then focus on refining it. That is achieved in the Prototype stage. Prototyping usually involves building interfaces. They look more advanced than the quick sketches previously done, so you need to start focusing on the details, meaning that instead of focusing on the general idea, we also focus the functionality and design. There are two types of prototype: low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototype.
Low-fidelity prototype: basic and functional prototype that focuses on the structure of the product, as well as the user’s flow i.e. their interaction with it.
High-fidelity prototype: Detailed and interactive prototype that looks very similar to the final product both with regard to design and functionality.
Testing
In the testing phase, we evaluate our product. This usually involves the recruitment of users and some assignation of tasks to check the functionality of our service. Usability Testing, A/B Testing, and Heuristic Evaluation, are the most important testing methods in ux design.
Usability Testing: In a usability testing session, the user is asked to carry out certain tasks (i.e. being able to perform certain actions in the app based on the functionality and features it has). The observer checks if there are any problems that impede the completion of those tasks, and collects any additional feedback the user provides.
A/B Testing: We compare the original version (version A) of a feature in our product with a new variation of it (version B) that we are unsure whether it would be beneficial or not for the product. The users are randomly assigned to using version A or B, and the way they have interacted will be later analysed to take the decision on which one to choose.
Heuristic Evaluation: The product is reviewed and checked against Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics: “Visibility of System Status, Match Between System & the Real World, User Control & Freedom, Consistency & Standards, Error Prevention, Recognition Rather than Recall, Flexibility & Efficiency of Use, Aesthetic & Minimalist Design, Help Users Recognise, Diagnose & Recover from Errors, and Help & Documentation”. Carrying out this test can help us find specific usability problems.
I hope this blog post has given you an insight into the most important principles to keep in mind when developing UX design. The best way to become better at UX design is… practice, practice, practice!
by Mar Caceres Munoz, Software Developer Coach