UX Design for Beginners

Modern-day Millenials are considered to be well-informed individuals who are picky with their tastes and preferences. This is because they were fortunate enough to experience the power of ‘options’ which was unpopular with all the previous generations. This can be considered to be the major reason for you and your company to come up with a  strong UX Design to ensure good User Experience on your site. Because if you don’t, your audiences will leave you for another website/app.

So, if you are a newbie in the UX world, you might probably be staring at the screen right now, wondering what exactly is UX? Let us explain!

So, the word UX stands for User Experience or User Experience Design which is directly concerned with the user’s experience when they surf any website or any mobile application. It is about designing definite interfaces so that the users can easily navigate through your website and can carry out any functions without any confusion.

Because, as mentioned earlier, your audiences will not waste their time if they have a bad experience on your site, they will directly leave your site to go to another one.

So, how do you ensure that your users have a positive experience on your website?  Is there a proper guide to ensure the same? This is what, User Research is for.

User Research

Before designing an application for a specific product/service/function, it is necessary to gain information about the users who will be using the website/application. This would thus help the company to ensure that it is on the right track.

This is the one essential step that needs to be taken at the beginning of the design process!

For eg: An application meant to be used by Government professionals will be significantly different than that which is used by college-going students. This is because, both of these audiences vary in terms of the functions they will carry out, their technical expertise as well as their psychological reactions.

Hence, the first step is to effectively research your audiences to get to know their likes and needs.

User Personas

The next step after researching about your Target Audiences is an important one and it is called coming up with User Personas which will let us know about the types of users who might use the application, thus helping the UX Designers make sure they are making an application which properly suits the needs and the habits of their Audiences.

In simple words, this includes coming up with a personification of individual users highlighting their goals, their habits, and their frustrations. This helps in basing design decisions with various facts.

User Experience Journey

User Experience Journey is one of the most important parts of UX Design and needs to be well thought in order to ensure the success of the website/app.

It lists out the experience of the users while they are performing specific functions to ensure they are in line and do not cause any confusion or any inconvenience.

For eg: The User Journey for a person who finds the website on Facebook would be significantly different than the journey of a user who finds the website manually.

Similarly, the journey for a user who wants to look for a particular item on a website will be different than that of the person who is just surfing the site for the New Collection. User Experience Journey helps us in optimising all the User Journeys to make sure that the users have a good experience.

App/Website Development

So, the next step after collecting significant information about your users and after looking at various User Personas is the step of coming up with your App/Website.

More often than not, user experience designers come up with a few iterations of their site/app with varied typography, color schemes, and icons. Here, they also experiment with the functions such as swiping, tapping, and pinching. The final decisions are made in the last step i.e. User Testing.

User Testing

The concluding step in UX Design is to test the website/app with the users directly to notice their individual User Journey and note down any difficulties they might have while navigating. All these difficulties need to be listed down and should be worked on in the future, thus leading to a final application/site.

Hence, it can be said that if the UX Process is carried out efficiently, it would lead to a positive User Experience which would be a definite way to attract and retain traffic on the website. It is the one way that would ensure success and lead to positive feedback from the users!

So, bid goodbye to frustrating websites and say hello to increasing traffic!