What is user experience (UX)?
User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are joy to own and joy to use…to achieve high-quality user experience there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphic and industrial design and interface design
─ Nielsen Norman Group
What is UX Design?
The heart of UX is evidence-based design. We can get more satisfied members and more public engaging with our website and social media, if we make design choices based on the reality of what our users think and do, rather than flawed assumptions. In other words, UX design is evidence based design.
Bringing value
We are expected to deliver value and delight for our users. The only way we can meet those expectations is to understand our users.
Design to solve real problems
Design decisions that are based on actual user feedback are founded on data instead of assumptions and pipe dreams.
Find new opportunities
It can help you to see new opportunities and increase the speed of creating new solutions.
Everyone is responsible for providing good user experiences
The most important element of building good UX is to have empathy for your users. Think about the user’s circumstances, their background, motivations and the tasks related to the experience at hand.
Get your hands on all available data: Surveys, web analytics, qualitative research studies.
If you have a large project and none of the user data is in existence, consider building time and resources to acquire it.
Contact web department and/or research personnel well ahead of time to get this very important data and build time to test your deliverables with a sample of the real end-users preferably before launch.
Be ready to learn and iterate: Make the best out of your research and testing results and implement changes based on those.
Usability vs. User Experience
Research company Nielsen Norman Group defines usability through these 5 aspects:
Learnability: Can the user complete their tasks with little or without any difficulty?
Efficiency: Does the interface allow the user to complete tasks in a timely manner?
Memorability: After leaving a website, how likely will the user be able to remember how to use it the next time they visit?
Errors: What steps does the interface take to lessen the chance of user error, and how do they let the users correct an error?
Satisfaction: Does the user enjoy interacting with the design?
Usability is one part of UX
Usability is just one aspect of User Experience. It is narrowly focused, as UX is the overarching, larger holistic concept.
User experience (UX) vs. User interface (UI)
“UI is the table, chair, plate, glass, and utensils. UX is everything from the food, to the service, parking, lighting and music.”
