In the last years, the web has seen a fast-paced revolution that has radically changed our day-by-day life. Unbelievable things are now possible and easy achievable thanks to the power of the internet and interconnection among people. Now everybody can easily do almost everything without even going out from home.
Many popular web apps and sites are very easy to use. It seems like they already know what and when we are going to do a specific thing. Is that a fortune or there is a purpose behind?
The young generation may not remember the way the first internet pages looked like. Ugly and “user-unfriendly” HTML products, still they were so fascinating as you were able to explore things none of us was ever able to see or to do before. At that time almost nobody cared about user experience and even fewer people had ever heard about it.
A little bit of history
The term “user experience” was used for the very first time by Donald Norman in his book “The Design of everyday things”. He then became the first “UX Designer” at Apple Computers and, by extension, in the world. Norman thought that instead of focusing on the system itself and the aesthetics of the interface, designers should be concentrated on the needs of the user.
From that day on UX design became more and more popular in all the most important companies in the world. Stakeholders and CEOs began to understand that without a proper user experience people won’t use a specific digital product, no matter how great that idea was.
The term user experience is involved in different products and services but it usually refers to digital products.
No UX = Users frustration
Let me tell you a story. As a UX Designer, I have recently had a chance to review a digital product used by hotel receptionists. The product was quite simple. The reception at that hotel gets so many calls that receptionists can’t possibly answer. To avoid losing calls and hotel reservations the management uses a third-party service to get data from customers who tried to call the hotel but didn’t get an answer. The data was eventually sent to a database where hotel receptionists could find the customer request, telephone number and e-mail.
During a usability testing we were observing the way receptionists were interacting with this product and we noticed they were frustrated. “What’s wrong?” we asked. They told us that using the software was frustrating as they can’t understand where to find things on it. They need to put extra efforts to understand it. Thus, the cognitive load was very high which results in a loss of productivity.
What was wrong with that product? It wasn’t user-centred. It was rather product-centred. The agency that made it didn’t care about users. They didn’t observe real users using that product, didn’t made proper research. As a result, users (receptionists) were using that product only because they couldn’t do otherwise as it was imposed by the management.
A better user experience allows users to avoid frustration. Consequently, it makes the overall experience enjoyable and pleasant. As a result, users will use the product which means better economic revenue for the company which released it.
Frank Chimero, the author of “The shape of design”, said:
“People ignore design that ignores people”
Frank Chimero
This is very much true especially today when concurrence is so harsh and standing out of the crowd is not easy as it was before.
What is UX design?
So what is UX design? A definition may be the following:
UX design is allowing users to use a product with no need for reading the instructions
Who of us when buying a product cares about reading instructions. Research shows that the majority of people who buy a product don’t care about reading instructions. They read instructions only when they are forced to do that, which means only when they don’t know how to use a specific feature or function of the product.
Let’s think about IKEA for example. All their products are accompanied with detailed instructions about how to put together pieces of furniture. Instructions are easy to understand and quite intuitive, but we read them only because we don’t have an alternative. We must read them if we want the chair, table or whatever we bought, to get assembled. The truth is – if we could avoid reading instructions we would.
A good UX designer should put the user in the position of using the product with no need for reading instructions. This is what he does and this is why we find all these apps and websites out there so intuitive and easy to use.
UX design process
What is the ideal UX design process? It usually involves different phases:
- Understand
- Research
- Analyze
- Design
- Implement
- Evaluate
They may have slightly different definitions but the point doesn’t essentially change. A good design process, whatever product we are talking about, digital or physical, should be made from all these stages and substantially benefit from them.
Depending on the product it may take weeks or months to cover all these steps. The more complicated and articulated the product is, the more designers should get in-depth knowledge about all the stages below.
Understand
The problem
What does need to be understood? Many things. For example, what is the problem we are trying to resolve with this product? Let’s think about a digital monster like Google for example. What is the problem Google is trying to solve with its searching engine? Easy! Finding specific web pages on the internet in the best way possible. Users have specific problems, real needs to solve. Putting yourself in users’ shoes will help you show empathy and understand the problem you are trying to solve. And Google succeed. The design of the Google search engine webpage is so simple and easy to use that it became the online giant we all know.
Joshua Becker, the author of many books about minimalistic design, put it this way:
Google’s home page includes a clean, white background; less than 30 words; a cheery, six-character logo; and a capacious search box. that’s it. and they turned it into 150 billion dollars.
As Becker highlights, Google’s success is not only behind the minimalist design of their webpage. A very important part of this success is behind the complicate algorithm that allows people to fina a search query in milliseconds.
When designers solve customers problems and they do that in the best way possible the result is rewarding.
Personas
With this regard an important UX tool is personas. Personas are vital for a good understanding of users’ needs. Many UXers would probably put personas in the research phase of the design process. My opinion is: it depends on different factors. For example, during the research phase are we going to do interviews to get a better understanding of the users? In many cases, UX Designers don’t have a chance to speak to real users which means they make personas based on assumptions and on data they have from stakeholders.
Brand
Is also important to understand what is the brand you are designing for. What is their positioning among other competitors? Let’s think about two other online monsters out there: AliExpress and Amazon. How are they different from one another? They are both e-commerce and you can buy things on them. But the way users perceive them is different. Ali Express is a low-cost e-commerce giant from China with long deliveries and low-quality products. On the other hand, Amazon is the American e-commerce with one of the best and fastest delivery services in the world and with literally all possible products available. Interestingly, they both have a great user experience and buying things on them is a seamless process. But they are different as users perception changes substantially when they use one site instead of another.
Benchmarking analysis
Benchmarking analysis is the analysis of the competitors in a specific field. Making such analysis helps in understanding how others are positioned inside the market and what are the common practices with this regard. What are the good points to imitate in them and what they do wrong and should be avoided? This is another tool many would probably relate to the research phase of the process. It is related to the research as well, but the reason why I put it in this phase of the process is that it helps in better understanding the field in which we are diving. Also, this is one of the first things we do in the UX process.
Research
Interviews
Having a chance to speak to real users would improve the final result. Interviews are a powerful tool of the UX methodology to achieve a better understanding of users’ needs. It takes a good while to frame meaningful, nonleading questions to interview users and another good while to get everything arranged and doing interview sessions. But it surely worths the effort. When choosing participants you should strive to find people who have recently used the product or been in the user’s role. Interviewing friends or colleagues won’t give an in-depth insight into the field.
Focus group
Similar to interviews but with a larger quantity of people. Focus groups are like interviews sessions but they contemplate a larger amount of people (from 6 to 12). They are cheaper and allow to gather more data from different people in less time. Focus group is a good alternative to interviews, still, this method may be categorized more as a quantitative than qualitative.
Surveys
This is a good method to gather some interesting data. Questions should be framed very carefully and should be nonleading. The result may be surprising sometimes as you may not expect to get a certain kind of answers, but this gives you important insights about decisions to make.
Usability testing
If you have an existing product and you need to understand what must be changed to improve user experience usability testing is what you need. It allows you to understand where users struggle when using the product and what must be improved to decrease users’ frustration. It consists of observing users interacting with the product. When running a usability test the team must provide at least two members to run the facilitator and the observer. The facilitator is the one who greets the tester, arranges the equipment to be ready, explains the way the test is going to be run and remind the tester to think aloud, in case he forgives. The observer/observers take notes of when and where the tester struggles during the usability test and whatever may be useful for the test. At the end of the sessions, the team gather to discuss the test results.
Analyze
This phase allows you to do a brief recap of what you have done in the previous two stages. You should gather all the information found together and analyze it to get in-depth knowledge about your design solutions.
Personas
Personas are your final users and help you understand user’s habits, goals, pain points etc… They help the team to keep focused on users’ needs and requirements. Whenever you get lost in the design process you can always get back to your personas and ask yourself: “What Tom (our persona) would think about that?”.
Customer journey map
This is a map of your user interacting with your product. It helps you gather a better understanding of what your users go thought during the process. The more detailed the map is, the more opportunities you can find to increase users satisfaction and business revenue. Normal Nielsen put it this way: “In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.” The key components of a customer journey map are actors, scenario+expectations, journey phases, actions, mindsets and emotions, opportunities.
Empathy map
This is a map of what your users feel, think, hear and do. It helps you empathize your users. It is also valuable as it allows the UX designer to convey users’ requirements to the whole team and keep it aligned with the work to accomplish. To make a proper empathy map is essential to put yourself in users’ shows and dive deep in users’ thoughts and feelings.
Design
Information architecture
Here you start thinking about all you need for your website. You need to put some extra effort though to make sure you are not missing anything in your digital product. This gives you an overall understanding of the site’s structure and helps the team to keep the pace with the job to do. Also, having a detailed site map allows the team to present it to the stakeholder for approval. This is an important step to determine before moving to visual design.
User flows
User flows helps us understand all the steps users go through. We usually start with a good day scenario where users go through all the pages and screens of the digital product with no issues and complete it to the end. We then proceed with examining bad day scenarios when users find problems like bad internet connections or 404 pages.
Wireframes and mockups
Once the sitemap and user flows are fixed by the whole team and the stakeholder is happy with that we proceed to work on the next step of our process. Wireframes and low fidelity mockups.
Images and illustrations
Images should be picked very carefully to ensure they meet brand identity and positioning in the market. They also may be used to convey the right UVP above the fold and meet users’ expectations. Illustrations are more about the visual part of the design. Still, we can include it as part of the UX process as everything on the page should be in harmony and interconnected. This will result in a final product which will be user-friendly and easy to use.
Icons
As well as illustrations they should be original and convey the right message. Icons shouldn’t be misleading or difficult to understand. Often they can be used as a signifier to indicate potential and intended affordances of an object.
Colours
Picking the right colours is essential to make sure the chosen colours meet users’ requirements and the brand’s identity. While colour is thought of as a purely aesthetic choice by some designers, it has, in fact, an important impact on users. When choosing colour pallette designer should consider factors as the ethnicity of the audience, brand colours and industry norms.
Implement
High fidelity prototype
Once the overall structure of the digital product has been chosen, all the design elements have been finalized and we have all the pages and screens of the digital product, whether webpage or app, we may now work on HF prototype to make sure there are no gaps left unfilled. A good practice is to test the design from the very early stages to make adjustments as soon as possible. HF prototypes should be tested on colleagues and other team’s members. They may be presented to stakeholders for final approval and be tested by real users arranging usability testings. Once all the last details have been approved, the stakeholder is happy and usability testings helped to fill possible gaps we step over to hand off the whole design to the development team.
Handoff to the dev team
I like the way Tony Ho Tran described the feelings of designers when they hand off the design to the dev team.
This process will feel much like being in the waiting room while your significant other goes into labour. You’re nervous, stressed, and just hope the baby isn’t weird looking when it’s delivered.
Tony Ho tran
There may be some slight differences between the actual design and the product delivered by developers.
Evaluate
User feedback
User feedback allows highlighting possible gaps and solving them as soon as possible. It consists of observing real users using the product and getting feedback from them.
Iterate design
UX process is not an A to Z journey. It’s more like a spiral. You go back to previous steps of the process to optimize the product and improving the user experience, bringing it to the desired result.
Conclusions
As competition grows the user experience is becoming a core value of many companies as it increases revenue and customers’ retention. The stages we have considered above are guidelines during the design process of a digital product. They may change depending on a number of factors as budget, deadlines and team members.