What is User Experience (UX) Design?
User experience (UX) design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product. User experience designers focus on improving all aspects of a digital product or service from its overall look and feel to how easy it is for users to accomplish their goals with it.
User Experience Design vs. UI Design: UX is not just about making things pretty; it involves understanding how people will interact with your website or app before you even start creating wireframes or visual mockups for your project.
User Experience Design Principles: In order to create an effective user experience, you need to keep these principles in mind at all times:
Why is UX Design Important?
UX design is important because it can help your business:
- Increase sales by providing a better user experience.
- Improve conversion rates and sales by making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for and complete the transaction.
- Reduce costs associated with customer support, returns, and training new employees due to poor user experience (UX).
UX Design Process
User experience (UX) design is a process of improving the usability, accessibility and pleasure provided in the interaction between humans and products. The goal of UX design is to enhance user satisfaction with a product or service by improving its ease of use, efficiency and pleasure.
The UX design process involves many activities: research & analysis; designing; prototyping; usability testing & iteration.
UX Design for Mobile Devices
- Responsive Design
- Mobile-First Design
- Touch Interfaces
UX Design Tools & Technologies
There are many UX design tools available to assist in the process of creating a website. The most common types of tools include wireframing, prototyping, usability testing and analytics.
UX Design Best Practices
User Experience Design (UXD) is a process that focuses on the experience of the user, rather than a particular technology or product. It’s about how people interact with your website or app and what they get out of it.
You can think of UXD as an umbrella term for many different activities:
- User Research – Understanding who your users are, what they need from your product and why they’re using it in the first place.
- Information Architecture – Organizing content into logical groups so that users can find what they’re looking for easily.
- Interaction Design – Creating interfaces that make sense to users by giving them clear choices at every step along their journey through your site or app (e-commerce sites often use shopping carts).
- Visual Design – The look and feel of everything from fonts used on buttons to color schemes used throughout pages/screens/menus etcetera!
UX Design Resources
UX Design Blogs
- UX Movement
- UX Magazine
- UX Collective
UX Design Books - Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (2000)
This book is a classic that has been around for over 20 years. It’s still relevant today, because it focuses on helping users find what they need quickly and easily. The author uses simple language to explain why some sites work well and others don’t, so even beginners can learn from this book.
UX Design Careers
UX Designer roles are diverse and can be found in a variety of industries, including healthcare, education and entertainment. Interested in looking into UX Design as a career? Here are the most common UX designer job titles include:
- User Experience Researcher (UXR) – A UXR studies user behavior to inform the design process. They may conduct focus groups or interviews with users to understand their needs, then create personas based on this information.
- Information Architect (IA) – An IA creates a site’s structure by deciding how pages should be organized into sections and subsections so that visitors can easily find what they’re looking for on your website or app without getting lost in an endless maze of links and buttons that lead nowhere useful!
- User Interface Designer (UID) – UIDs create visual elements like buttons, icons and menus within an application or website interface so that users can interact with them easily while using it!
