User Experience Design is the science of making products beautiful, usable and loveable. It's about solving problems with the best solutions for the website's target audience.
The customer can’t understand your website or see how to contact you, and looks elsewhere.
Your designer creates a user-friendly website that forms a connection with users, turning them into customers.
The design has solved your problem: made customers aware of you and made it easy to contact you.
The term 'User Experience' or 'UX' has been thrown around a lot in the last few years, with very few people actually knowing what it truly means. Here's what you can expect from a UX Designer, and how it differs to your traditional web designer.
Before designing can begin it's vital that your designer understands your business, your goals, and what your users want. That last one is the most important. Businesses often think they know what their users want without the appropriate design research. As success nowadays often hinges on the user experience, this step cannot be overlooked.
It involves creating personas for your users. It's impossible to please everyone, so creating a persona of several similar user groups you wish to target is the best way to please most of them.
This is a rough guide for the layout of a website or app, and what most UX Designers are widely known for. The truth is, there's so much more than just drawings!
Generally starting on paper to get quick and simple ideas down without getting attached to them, here we're looking for quantity. We can then sift through and refine, then turn the more promising ideas into digital wireframes.
Following on from the initial paper wireframes, here we can refine further and arrange the layout of elements by importance and relevance to the user.
These static digital wireframes then become interactive prototypes that anyone can click through, to get an idea of the flow of the site - how the user will navigate around and get from A to B.
It's not enough to release a website into the wild and assume it's gonna be fine. You need to continually measure it's performance and see how well it's doing. If it's not performing as expected, you can rethink and improve, to gain more customers and make more profit. You don't want to risk your website being a disaster.
If it's performing adequately, you can run user tests and see why it isn't doing better. From this research, your UX designer can improve the site based on real customers desires and needs.
No 'About' page worth its salt would avoid the obligatory 'famous person quote'. So here's it is. As Steve Jobs said, "Design isn't just how it looks or feels. Design is how it works". If you want a project to reach it's maximum potential, then the pay for a professional with (years of experience) to do that for you suddenly doesn't seem like such a stretch.
However, every professional needs a hobby. Here's mine:
I also play steel drums in a local Gloucestershire band. You can enjoy the songs on Youtube or hire us for any gig, any size, big or small. Pandemonium Steel Band is always happy to perform, so get in touch!
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