What is User Experience?
Overview
User Experience (UX) Design is a concept that is widely associated with digital products; however, it can and should be applied to all forms of design and other mediums in the creative world. Simply put, "user experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with a product or service.
Achieving a successful experience
The first step in creating an incredible user experience is to determine the needs of the customer through user research. User research can be conducted in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, interviews, testing, focus groups and feedback or surveys. Once the user group is defined and properly understood, the creative design process can begin. The goal here is to create products that are a joy to use and are tailored to the target audience.
User experience goes beyond just giving users what they think they want or simply providing the baseline, minimum features of a product or service. A great user experience includes a seamless combination across multiple disciplines: marketing, product design, service execution, interface design and so on. Anything that your company or product involves should be thought about in the overall experience for your platform. This is what truly makes user experiences successful.
User experience vs usability
User experience and usability go hand-in-hand and heavily rely on each other for the total success of a project. Usability is a strong piece of user experience as it includes things such as efficiency, user interface design, accessibility, and on-boarding time. Usability typically refers to how easy a product is for users to interact with. User experience, on the other hand, is all about the way users feel about interacting with the product. Usability is about the functionality, while UX is all about the experience.
The role of a UX designer
UX designers study and evaluate how users feel about a product or system. They look at things like the ease of use, overall value, utility, efficiency in performing tasks and more. UX designers could evaluate the experience of a product in general or they could look at subsystems within a product, so the exact role of a UX designer can be flexible depending on the project they’re working on. For example, they might study the layout of an online store’s website or they could focus primarily on the checkout process to determine how efficient that process is.
A product or service’s success relies on only one thing: how users perceive it. “Does this product give me value? Is it easy to use? Is it pleasant to use?” These are the questions that run through the minds of visitors as they interact with products or services, and this is how they decide if they’ll become regular users. This is what UX designers focus on: attracting and retaining users.
Invest in user experience
UX design is not a one size fits all solution. It won’t work in every situation for every user because, as human beings, we are all different. What works for one person might have the opposite effect on another. UX design requires research and proper evaluations to determine the best solutions on how to improve products and services to better fit their user’s needs.
And just as humans are all different, so are products and services. User experiences can not be replicated for one product exactly on another product. User experiences will be different between products. A great experience must be tailored to the goals, values, process and use cases of its users. If you care about your product or service, you should invest in properly studying your users.
