User Experience (UX) Design and it's Process — A Beginners Guide.

When was the last time you left a website because you couldn't seem to get a hang of what to do to complete the task you came for? You had spent a couple of minutes scrolling and clicking, but with every click of the button came another dead end. If you've been in this situation before, two things must have happened:

• You were either looking for the service on a wrong website or
• The website had a terrible User Experience (UX) Design.

Either way, you left the website confused – and probably frustrated – because of the latter. This is because, if the website had a good UX design, you'd have gotten what you came for effortlessly; And, if what you needed wasn't on offer on the website, you'd have realized it without having to waste those very precious two minutes.

Now, what exactly is UX Design, and why is it important?

User Experience (UX) Design is all about giving users the best experience possible as they engage with your product. It is the process of designing products and services that are relevant to users, and enables them complete their preferred tasks while interacting with the product as effortlessly and quickly as possible.

If you've ever left a website confused and frustrated as I illustrated earlier, you'd have an idea as to why UX Design is important, and why it should be done right.

It's importance cannot be overemphasized for brands that offer online services to it's customers. This is because User Experience plays a key role in attracting and retaining customers. A customer can turn to your competitor if he has a poor experience using your product. This could smear your reputation and affect your business in the long run – if not immediately.

So what process should one take to do UX Design right?

When taking on any UX design project, it is best to approach it with a new and renewed energy. A new energy to learn the needs of your prospective users, analyze their problems and thinker effective solutions to solve them. This is basically the UX process.

Although there's no conventional order to follow when carrying out a UX design project, the typical process would involve the following;

• Product Definition
• Research
• Analysis
• Design
• Testing

This process may differ with project (or clients) but the main aim of a designer is to create products that meets user needs after thoroughly researching what those needs are. Often times, it requires iteration of a few steps in the process and, sometimes, iteration of the whole process; Whatever it takes to design a product that delivers the best experience to the user.

A Typical UX Design Process

Now let's take a brief look at each step of the typical UX Design process, shall we?

1. Product Definition: This is the stage of the UX process where the project concept is born. The designers, together with stakeholders, define the context of existence of the product and what major user need it's expected to meet. They brainstorm and come to a conclusion on how to bring the product to life by outlining business goals, creating concept sketches and structuring the product design teams.
2. Research: With an idea of the product in mind, it's time for research. At this point, the research team conducts both User research — to ascertain the needs of prospective users or users of similar products, and discover their pain points and possible resolutions — and Market research — to determine the viability of the product by analysing similar products, and discovering the personas of users that may need the product.
3. Analysis: After research, the team goes ahead to analyze the results to gain understanding of not just what the users need, but why the users need what they need. They also create user personas of prospective end-users with data from research. Analysis of research results helps to validate the concept of the product which was birthed during the product definition stage.
4. Design: As the user needs and expectations have been made clear from thorough research, it's now time to design the product with these needs and expectations as reference. The design team often starts by creating sketches (on paper or digital sketching tools) to come up with raw, innovative ideas. After selecting the ideas to go with, they create wireframes to help in visualization the elements of desired pages. They then create prototypes using the wireframes as foundations. First, low-fidelity, then high-fidelity prototypes (which could be used during testing) with design specifications for Developers to bring the product to life.
5. Testing: This is a very important phase of the design process as it helps to validate the whole process and discover if the design works for it's users. It's best to start testing the design amongst the members of the team to get feedback, uncover flaws and make corrections before major User testing sessions. Usability testing, beta testing, A/B testing, focus groups and surveys are all great ways of gaining valuable data on how users interact with your product.

As stated earlier, the UX process is iterative and it, most times, takes alot of trail and error to arrive at a product that is good enough for users. For instance, while testing a product, you may realize that certain user needs were misinterpreted, have changed or been modified between the time of research and the time of design. So, you may need to go back to analyze this new data, come up with fresh ideas and create prototypes to meet the new need. So, essentially, the UX process is not just iterative but, also, continuous as user needs and wants are constantly evolving.

In summary,

The objective of User Experience (UX) design is creating a product which delivers an impeccable experience to customers. The process which you decide to adopt for your project is less important, so long as the result of that process is a product that meets the needs of your users to near perfection – if not perfectly.

Thanks for your time and I hope you enjoyed reading this piece as much as I enjoyed creating it. Don't forget to leave me up to 50 claps by long pressing the clap button below. And, keep designing!