What is UX?
User experience (UX) design is an analytical process to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty to the brand, by improving usability of a product or service. To understand customers and create a delightful customer experience, UX involves persona building, user journey maps, data analysis and more.
A UX designer for a web design company specialises in creating a positive user experience for digital products and services. This will range from research-based placement of call-to-action buttons on websites to implementing usability testing to assess the effectiveness of design concepts.
What is UI?
It is common for UX designers to adopt user interface (UI) designs as part of the UX design process. UI explores the visual aesthetics of a product or service, such as graphic illustrations, font choice, brand logos and icons. In short, UX and UI work together to bring about the best design solutions as a whole.
“The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman hit it off the shelves in the 90’s, during the digital boom. He used UX of everyday things to explain how UX fits within websites and software applications. Of course, UX design is applicable to all things and not just digital products.
UX Designers
So, what does a UX designer do? And what are their responsibilities on a web design team? Primarily, a UX designer focuses on strategising a desirable experience for users, assessing the effectiveness of design concepts and, to go over and beyond, delivering concepts on various mediums.
Typically, UX designer’s take responsibility to:
- follow traffic acquisition to ensure best approaches are implemented to increase user views of a website, recording users visits across various devices.
- design and develop concepts specific to the projects, preparing media-ready graphics, such as brochures or social media post
- collaborate with the client and colleagues to develop creative solutions to meet the client’s needs, in line with their overall marketing strategy.
- research new design trends to encourage innovative designs.
- share knowledge on web accessibility and design principles.
- run design thinking workshops to facilitate whole-team collaboration.
User-centred designs
User-centred designs support organisations to deliver their message in a way the user can digest it. In turn, this contributes towards any overarching goals an organisation may have. For example, users reading a website article on ‘Empowering girl’s education’ in a developing country, where resources are scarce, may feel intrinsically motivated to act and desire to support this website. Effective placement of a call-to-action button, such as ‘Donate now’, is key to the success for the user and the organisation.
UX designers do it all
In summary, UX designers are like rainbows. They hold a little bit of colour from everywhere. They don’t just design an experience, they also play the role of a graphic illustrator, strategists, marketing expert, copywriter, data analyst and workshop facilitator. They will go over and beyond to tackle user frustrations with a hard fist, bungee jump to optimise content and somersault to deliver the best user experience to your customers.
As a UX/UI designer at Framework Digital, running design thinking workshops and conducting usability testing has helped me understand how crucial it is to align user needs with business goals for impactful websites.
– Written by Shah, UX Designer
