UX Design or: How We Bring User-Centered Methods into Projects

Why is UX design so important?

The service that comes with a product is often just as important as the product itself these days. That's why it's crucial to have an intuitive, user-centered, and inspiring user experience across all touchpoints. The goal of digital solutions and products is to make our lives and work easier. Before I can start developing a new solution, I need to understand what users need and what problems they're facing. That's exactly what I do as a UX designer.

There's no such thing as a perfect process. 

It's all about paying attention, identifying the most important points, then developing, designing, testing, and refining. It's not a closed process because digital products are always changing. The perfect UX process—one that uses all the methods—is often just theory. Because of time and budget constraints, many development projects use just a few methods rather than the full suite. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Every project is different, so every project has different priorities and challenges that need to be solved.

For instance, in a previous project, it was really important to understand how a particular group of users would use an internal digital tool in their work. To do this, we used the "Contextual Inquiry" method, which basically means looking at the context. In this process, participants do tasks and then discuss what they've done. I was really impressed by how much insight you can gain from this.

Another project I worked on involved analyzing a website. I put together an evaluation catalog over the past few years that helps me quickly get an analysis for basic topics.

But let's go back to the basics. So, what exactly is part of the process? I'll give you a quick overview of the process in six steps:

1. Understanding the Context of Use

It's important to start by getting to know your users and what they need. There are lots of ways to do this, from surveys, focus groups, and data analysis to creating scenarios and customer journey maps, and ethnographic methods. You can also get information by talking to people in your company and holding workshops. It's really important to understand what users want and need.

2. Defining user requirements

Next, we define the user requirements. This involves creating one or more user groups or personas. I think it's often a good idea to group users for smaller projects, since individual fictitious personas can be a bit arbitrary. It can also be useful to list the company's goals, in addition to the users' goals and needs. 

3. User Interface Design

User interface design, or UI design for short, is my specialty. I'll probably write a blog post about this at some point. Once you know what the users need, you can start putting together a page structure, which often includes the navigation structure right from the start. This is the basic structure of the website.

Next, we'll create wireframes. These show the structure and content of each page. There's a big range in the level of detail, from "real" content that's defined at all page levels to very simple "sketches," like a one-pager. This is a good place to talk about the content without getting sidetracked by the visuals. It's not uncommon for products or services to be tested in this phase, for example using an interactive prototype.

At this point, we start designing the look and feel of the product, which is also called the visual design or user interface design. In a nutshell, the main goal of the design is to guide the user. In visual design, things like grids, color concepts, typography, moving images, and icons are really important. Once you've got these components nailed down, you can start putting them into action. If you're creating a new brand for a website or product, you need to decide on a look and feel. This is basically how the whole thing should come across. Often, though, you'll be designing a digital product within the parameters of a company's overall corporate design. Once you've got all the components designed, you can start putting together the style guide. This is a kind of reference guide for developers that includes all the important info in a neat, organized format.

This is where perceptual psychology really comes into play. Our eyes give us 80% of the information we take in from our surroundings, which our brains then process. How we perceive things depends on a number of different factors. For instance, it depends on what we're trying to achieve, the context, and our learning experience. It's best for the eye if objects are grouped and there's enough color contrast, because colors help us recognize objects and shapes.

4. Content is king.

I'd also like to talk about UX writing. Writing for digital products is a whole different ballgame than writing for print. It's best to break up the text into short sections with subheadings, because most users only scan the text. The idea is to keep it simple and only include what's essential. It's important to have meaningful headlines and well-structured texts. Put the most important info at the top, because you never know how far users will scroll. Using the right heading hierarchies and visual breaks (white space) helps users understand the different sections more quickly. Another great way to add some variety is to use links. And don't forget, your users are the most important thing. Write clearly, concisely, and helpfully.

5. Evaluation and Testing

In this phase, we make a distinction between qualitative tests (like usability tests and user interviews) and quantitative tests (like A/B tests or analytics and surveys). You can get a feel for what people think by asking them in an interview or questionnaire. Or you can just observe how users actually behave. It's a good idea to test your product as soon as you can, and then keep testing it to make sure it works well and is easy to use. It gives us designers some great feedback that we can use to make improvements to our designs.

I've been using a UX/UI checklist to quickly get an overview of a website for a while now. This covers things like how the content is seen, how users interact with it, the structure of the content and the page layout, feedback, error messages, usability, responsiveness and accessibility. We also check things like the visual appearance, consistency, and task appropriateness of a website, as well as the SEO guidelines. 

6. UX and Service Design

Service design goes a step further than UX design. It looks at problems from a holistic perspective. It helps us picture what the future could look like and break down the steps to get there into realistic phases. The key is to put people first and get both the business and users involved in the design process. It's also important to think about the user journey, which is about what happens before and after the service experience (not just during it). 

All or nothing?

User Experience Design doesn't always require a complex and comprehensive UX process. It's the individual methods we use in our daily work that help us focus on users, their goals, and their experiences. Over time, we develop our own techniques, checklists, and collections that allow us to work faster and more professionally in the UX process. My passion is to inspire people with digital experiences because they shape our emotions and influence our actions.