You’ve probably seen the letters “UX” at some point, you may even know that UX stands for “User Experience”–but what does it really mean?
“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master”—Milton Glaser
Welcome to the first in a series of short illustrated articles, explaining the basics of UX design.
It Starts With Understanding
In the real world, it is crucial to develop
empathy and understanding of your product’s users; the audience or stakeholders
that interact with it (whether directly or indirectly).
Simply put, the responsibility of user experience (UX) designers is to understand users. And this is easier said than done. Users are human–they have a changing set of behaviors, preferences and goals. Understanding users in the real world becomes even more challenging while balancing their needs with other competing needs of your business, engineering resources, market demands, brand, etc.
However, UX is important. It ultimately makes a product more useful, understandable, usable and beautiful.
Learn to Have Empathy
To design great user experience you need to learn to have empathy for your users. So much of good design comes from understanding.
This can also be thought of in terms of goals:
- Who does the user want to be?
- What does the user want to do?
- How does the user want to feel?
Understand your users; who they are, why they are using your product, what they want, and how best to get them to where they want to be.
In the next part of this illustrated series, we’ll look at UX Design Tools–see you there!
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