User experience (UX) is all about catering the design of a product, for example, a website or mobile app to appropriately meet the needs and goals of users – using the product.

There are two primary disciplines in UX, User Experience Research and User Experience Design.

• UX Research is the first step in the process of understanding the user experience of your existing website. Doing research helps you thoroughly understand users and how they interact with platforms, what services they want and when and what inspires and motivates them.
• UX Design is about making the user’s experience with the product (i.e. website) the best it can be, it’s not graphic or web design – it is more website/app structural design that is before the graphic design phase.

Different Aspects that Makeup UX

User Research

User research is the starting point for any product design. Research unpacks information about website users, their behaviour, goals, motivations, and needs. It also shows how users currently navigate on a website, app etc. and where they come up against any difficulties and how they feel when interacting with a platform.

What is involved with UX Research?

• Interviews – Usually a one-on-one informal interview in person or Skype session with a user to establish their goals and needs
• Online surveys – This method allows you to collate a lot of data on specific themes from lots of different users
• Persona (creation) – A persona is not a real person, but a character who has many of the traits of your users. A persona of your frequent customers can be created once enough evidence has been gathered from real users. Using personas allows you to quickly imagine how your users think and behave when you’re designing your product
• User testing – Doing user testing will enable you to get a good idea of the user experience via observation and interviews with real users while they interact with your platform. It can help to get them to say the actions they’re performing aloud while they are doing them so that you can get an insight into their thought processes.

UX Design

The design of a product (website, app) revolves around functionality and usability, rather than colours or pictures (these are established later by a graphic or web designer). Having figured out during the user research phase what your users expect from your website, what their goals are and how they like to operate a system, it is the functionality and usability design that comes first.

What is involved in UX Design?

• Information architecture (IA) This addresses the hierarchy of the content & website navigation on a page, mainly what is most important for the user to see and when. For example, most users expect a logo to be at the top left of the page. Because of this expectation, we always keep a logo to the top left of a web page.
• Wire-framing – Wire-framing is concerned with the user’s navigation through each page and between pages. It is a process which involves drawing a basic sketch, by hand or with a program like Balsamic, of each page and deciding where the elements on that page should be so that the user flow is as smooth as possible.
• Prototyping – Using tools like InVisionApp, or even drawings on paper, UX designers create prototypes of the web pages they designed at the wire-framing stage. This allows testing of the prototype with users before the design is implemented by the graphic design and development teams

User Testing

UX is also an on-going practice and facilitates continual optimisation of a website design and is super important to serving users and increasing conversion. Another reason to do user testing is to provide collaboration of ideas – for example, if one Marketing Manager has an idea for the website that is a bit off-field you can always A-B test the idea and see what the user uptake is.

What does User Testing involve?

• Usability testing – This is how UX designers evaluate a website by testing it on real users. It can be done through observing users interacting with the site, or asking them questions while they interact with it. It is the most effective way of understanding how well the website meets the user’s goals
• Remote user testing – Similar to usability testing, remote user testing is when the testing does not take place in the same place as the UX designer but is done remotely i.e. – via Skype. Remote user testing can take place because the target user is located far away or if costs need to be kept down
• A/B testing – This is when users are sent two versions of the same page or product, and the UX designer can see which of the two versions all users clicked the most

Implementation of UX work

The implementation of UX research and design mostly depends on your company size, if you’re a one-man-band with a blog you might implement testing and design variations yourself via your WordPress or if you have a large company you might have an IT Team with Digital Project Managers, Developers & Digital Product Owners that you or another team member will work with to execute the UX outputs.