User experience/UX for short is a term used to describe the experience of how a user finds and assesses the quality of a product. It plays a major role in today's web development.
A large part of the design of web content has the so-called “UX design”, “experience design” or “user-centered design”, which puts the user in focus and touches upon a holistic design approach.
User experience also plays a central role in the success or failure of a product and whenever any product is designed and conceived. This could be household objects, cars, or a website.
Also, user expectations play a major role in the quality of the user experience and to what extent these requirements are fulfilled by the product. This context also covers user-centered design. Alongside aesthetic criteria, it is also important to put the user at the center of product development. Good UX design fulfills both the aesthetic and practical expectations that a user has of a product. The product thereby meets a need that the user has.
For websites, for example, it is often the case that they should be:
1- easily accessible and make the individual elements of navigation as well as the finding of relevant content easier
2- The content should be easy to grasp with sensibly chosen contrasts
3- easily readable font
4- clear text structure
In its simplest form, a website designed with user-friendliness ensures that a user quickly finds precisely what they were looking for.
Alongside the design, the performance of the site also plays a major role in user satisfaction. If a website only loads very slowly and if the content only builds up very hesitantly, then the user experience is influenced. The same applies to internet sites that are not optimized for mobile but are also visited by users with smartphones.
Here I will be sharing with you some user experience components:
- Include usability as well as accessibility.
The term usability is described in its own ISO standard:
“Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” (DIN ISO 9241-11)
The user experience, on the other hand, is outlined in the ISO standard with the following words: “A person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service. […] This includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors, and accomplishments that occur before, during, and after use.” (DIN ISO 9241-210)
The big difference between usability and user experience, firstly, exists in the time period to which both terms relate. Because usability exclusively comes down to the duration during the use of a product. The user experience, on the other hand, also includes the ideas that a user has about a product. It also checks whether these expectations are fulfilled as part of the use. This makes usability a part of the user experience.
- Influence of UX on rankings
Good user experience can have a lasting influence on the ranking of a website in the search results. In this case, user signals such as visit duration, return-to-SERP rate (search engine results pages), or the CTR of a website are taken into account by search engines such as Google. It is assumed that the algorithms of the search engines count these metrics amongst the ranking factors.
- Measuring the user experience
The user experience can be determined in different ways. Depending on the method, different tools and techniques are used.
A/B tests: Various versions can be tested in web design. In this case, the version that has the best values in terms of various metrics such as purchases, visit duration, or bounce rate is used.
Heat maps: On websites, heat maps can show how users move around the site and which elements cause the most interaction.
Google Analytics and other web analysis tools: Classic values such as visit duration or sales can be checked with the help of web tracking software.
Surveys: It is particularly in product development that user surveys are carried out as part of agile methods. Even individual teams can develop surveys in the development of products as part of rapid prototyping, on the basis of which a product is then further designed. Here, concepts such as the joy of use or usability play a central role.
Usability testing: There is the opportunity to carry out so-called usability tests for websites or other products. These base on questionnaires that the target group has to fill in when using the product.
So now, as we knew what does UX means, shall we know more about how to choose the right UX designer and what we can expect from him to bring as an added value to our product, LETS DIVE IN!
What Should A UX Designer Do?
Always remember that UX Design is User-Centered. Since UX design encompasses the entire user journey, it’s a multidisciplinary field – UX designers come from a variety of backgrounds such as visual design, programming, psychology, and interaction design. Designing for human users also means you have to work with a heightened scope regarding accessibility and accommodating many potential users’ physical limitations, such as reading small text. A UX designer’s typical tasks vary, but often include:
1- user research
2- creating personas
3- designing wireframes and interactive prototypes
4- testing designs.
These tasks can vary greatly from one organization to another, but they always demand designers to be the users’ advocate and keep the users’ needs at the center of all design and development efforts. That’s also why most UX designers work in some form of a user-centered work process and keep channeling their best-informed efforts until they address all of the relevant issues and user needs optimally.
Lastly, I would like to share with you a quote I liked,
“No product is an island. A product is more than a product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service – from initial intentions through final reflections, from the first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
— Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience”