If you ask anyone in the IT sector what UX means, you will probably get a wide variety of answers. UX design is a concept that many people might have heard about, but they probably have not clearly understood what it means and why it is important. So we are going to try to explain this concept for you.
UX stands for User Experience. With UX design you therefore work to improve the entire user experience of a product or service and not just its visual design. At its heart UX design is really about designing solutions that the users will enjoy using, but that also meet their needs. A UX designer matches these needs to the company’s business goals and resources.
What does a UX designer do?
How does a UX designer achieve a positive user experience? UX work comprises a whole host of different aspects and the work will vary considerably from day to day.
A UX design process often contains the following elements:
- Strategic work – Understanding the problem, and defining the benefit and business goals.
- Research work – Identifying who the users are and what they need, using workshops, interviews, questionnaires and analysing user data.
- Requirements and analysis – Creating personas, user stories and information architecture based on the results of the research work.
- Design – Defining what the product will look like and how it will work in practice. Creating wireframes, interactive prototypes and style templates.
- Quality assurance – Making sure that the product does what it should; this is achieved through user tests, questionnaires and interviews.
- Iteration – A design process is iterative and you normally have to repeat the stages in the process to achieve the best results.
By basing the design work on the user needs, we can make sure that the experience reflects the users’ needs and expectations. If you have a positive user experience and it meets their needs, you will create satisfied and loyal users, which has a positive impact on, for example, sales, and creates other benefits as well. However, if a product or service is difficult to use or does not meet the users’ needs, you will quickly lose users.
Nowadays it is not enough for a product to simply work; a good user experience is just as important to make the users want to stay with you. There is tough competition for attracting the attention of customers in IT and a product that has a worse user experience will normally lag behind. It is therefore worth spending time on UX work to create a well-thought out final product so that the users are satisfied and want to stay with you.
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