User experience design


User experience design, upon which is the centralized requirements for "User Experience Design Research", defines the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. User experience design is a user centered design approach because it considers the user's experience when using a product or platform. Research, data analysis, and test results drive design decisions in UX design rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions, for which is known as UX Design Research. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience, and encompasses all design aspects and design stages that are around a customer's experience.

History

User experience design is a conceptual design discipline rooted in human factors and ergonomics. This field since the late 1940s has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. User experience became a positive insight for designers in the early 1990s with the proliferation of workplace computers. Don Norman, a professor and researcher in design, usability, and cognitive science, coined the term "user experience", and brought it to a wider audience that is inside our modernized society.

Elements

Research

User experience design draws from design approaches like human-computer interaction and user-centered design, and includes elements from similar disciplines like interaction design, visual design, information architecture, user research, and others.
Another portion of the research is understanding the end-user and the purpose of the application. Though this might seem clear to the designer, stepping back and empathizing with the user will yield the best results.
It helps to identify and prove or disprove assumptions, find commonalities across target audience members, and recognize their needs, goals, and mental models.

Visual design

Visual design, also commonly known as graphic design, user interface design, communication design, and visual communication, represents the aesthetics or look and feel of the front end of any user interface. Graphic treatment of interface elements is often perceived as the visual design. The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colors, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. Fundamentals of Gestalt psychology and visual perception give a cognitive perspective on how to create effective visual communication.

Information architecture

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services to support usability and findability.
In the context of information architecture, information is separate from both knowledge and data, and lies nebulously between them. It is information about objects. The objects can range from websites, to software applications, to images et al. It is also concerned with metadata, or data used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, process, and organizations. Information architecture also encompasses how the pages and navigation are structured.

Interaction design

It is well recognized that the component of interaction design is an essential part of user experience design, centering on the interaction between users and products. The goal of interaction design is to create a product that produces an efficient and delightful end-user experience by enabling users to achieve their objectives in the best way possible.
The growing emphasis on user-centered design and the strong focus on enhancing user experience have made interaction designers essential in shaping products that align with user expectations and adhere to the latest UI patterns and components.
In the last few years, the role of interaction designer has shifted from being just focused on specifying UI components and communicating them to the engineers to a situation in which designers have more freedom to design contextual interfaces based on helping meet the user's needs. Therefore, User Experience Design evolved into a multidisciplinary design branch that involves multiple technical aspects from motion graphics design and animation to programming.

Usability

Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
Usability is attached to all tools used by humans and is extended to both digital and non-digital devices. Thus, it is a subset of user experience but not wholly contained. The section of usability that intersects with user experience design is related to humans' ability to use a system or application. Good usability is essential to positive user experience but does not alone guarantee it.

Accessibility

Accessibility of a system describes its ease of reach, use, and understanding. In terms of user experience design, it can also be related to the overall comprehensibility of the information and features. It helps shorten the learning curve associated with the system. Accessibility in many contexts can be related to the ease of use for people with disabilities and comes under usability. In addition, accessible design is the concept of services, products, or facilities in which designers should accommodate and consider for the needs of people with disabilities. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines state that all content must adhere to the four main principles of POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

WCAG compliance

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This makes web content more usable to users in general. Making content more usable and readily accessible to all types of users enhances a user's overall user experience.

Human–computer interaction

Human–computer interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

Getting ready to design

After research, the designer uses the modeling of the users and their environments. User modeling or personas are composite archetypes based on behavior patterns uncovered during research. Personas provide designers a precise way of thinking and communicating about how groups of users behave, how they think, what they want to accomplish and why. Once created, personas help the designer to understand the users' goals in specific contexts, which is particularly useful during ideation and for validating design concepts. Other types of models include workflow models, artifact models, and physical models.

Design

When the designer has a solid understanding of the user's needs and goals, they begin to sketch out the interaction framework. This stage defines the high-level structure of screen layouts, as well as the product's flow, behavior, and organization. There are many kinds of materials that can be involved during this iterative phase, from whiteboards to paper prototypes. As the interaction framework establishes an overall structure for product behavior, a parallel process focused on the visual and industrial designs. The visual design framework defines the experience attributes, visual language, and the visual style.
Once a solid and stable framework is established, wireframes are translated from sketched storyboards to full-resolution screens that depict the user interface at the pixel level. At this point, it is critical for the programming team to collaborate closely with the designer. Their input is necessary to create a finished design that can and will be built while remaining true to the concept.

User research

is the systematic study of target users and their requirements in order to add realistic contexts and insights to the design process. It commonly involves methods such as interviews, surveys, field studies, and contextual inquiry. The data gathered from user research helps designers understand user goals, behaviors, and pain points, which in turn informs design decisions throughout the product lifecycle. By grounding design choices in evidence rather than assumptions, user research reduces the risk of creating products that fail to meet user needs. It also supports the creation of user personas and scenarios, which help maintain a user-centered focus during design and development.

UX deliverables

UX designers perform a number of different tasks and, therefore, use a range of deliverables to communicate their design ideas and research findings to stakeholders. Regarding UX specification documents, these requirements depend on the client or the organization involved in designing a product. The four major deliverables are: a title page, an introduction to the feature, wireframes, and a version history. Depending on the type of project, the specification documents can also include flow models, cultural models, personas, user stories, scenarios, and any prior user research.
The deliverables that UX designers will produce as part of their job include wireframes, prototypes, user flow diagrams, specification and tech docs, websites and applications, mockups, presentations, personas, user profiles, videos, and, to a lesser degree, reports. Documenting design decisions, in the form of annotated wireframes, gives the developer the necessary information they may need to successfully code the project.

After launching a project

Requires:
  • User testing/usability testing
  • A/B testing
  • Information architecture
  • Sitemaps and user flows
  • Additional wireframing as a result of test results and fine-tuning