We care a lot about users in web design. Users are what give life to the study of UX and UI. We try our best to create a pleasant experience for users and keep them our customers, our readers, and our audience. When you are designing a website, you should always have users at heart. User experience design is dedicated to creating the best experience for users on a website. In this article, we’ll take a look at:
UX designers are the people who mix psychology with technology. Psychology is definitely an inseparable aspect of UX design. To design the user experience of a product, we need to understand users. We need to understand how they think, what they seek, what they need, and how they will react to a product. We have lots of sources and materials to understand the behavior of a user. There are also data on how users read the information on websites or how they use products. For this purpose, there are eye-tracking data, AIs, and lots of tools that can help a UX designer understand what exactly it is that users will want from a product.
Simply put, in order to design, we need to understand the project. Then, we should understand the users and design the user experience using the necessary tools. There are many people who dedicate their time to one of the studies in the UX field. Here are some of them.
As the name suggests, Information Architecture deals with giving structure to the way data and information is presented. Experts in this field organize everything from data to sitemaps and layouts. After understanding the goal of the project, the plans, and the strategies, they start classifying data and providing wireframes, user journey maps, and user flow diagrams. Therefore, these are the specialists that will determine how users will be redirected around different functions on a website or an app.
UX research is necessary from the beginning of the project. User experience researchers should evaluate the early concepts of the products, all the ideas about UX strategy, and various information. They are an essential part of the UX team because they will be working with users in mind all the time. They study the users’ behaviors and try to come up with user personas, carry out experiments with users, and run questionnaires and surveys to understand users’ needs better.
UX designers make use of the information provided by the user researchers and information architects to come up with wireframes and run user tests and a/b tests. They work closely with everyone else to offer layouts for the User Interface designers to work based on. Most of the time in companies, there is one UX designer doing all the work that UX researchers and information architects do. However, this is only the case with small companies on the path of growth.
Users will need to navigate through various sections of a website or an app. Basically, they need to interact with several things. These interactions are an important part of the user experience. Users will remember how satisfying it was to interact with objects in a product. Interaction designers will be designing how these interactions take place, how the product responds to a click or a press, how colors change or buttons redirect users to a new page. These are all important parts of prototyping.
This one sounds a bit strange. You might ask why UX designers would be involved with copywriting. It’s because the promotional and commercial sentences that we see on products, including brand slogans, are all parts of what shapes the experience of a user. In other words, copywriting and finding the best words and sentences that can make a user feel welcomed or comfortable are vital for a business. Users should feel like they can trust a brand. That is the job of a UX designer to provide the copy content needed.
Similar to UI designers and front-end developers, there are tools that UX designers can use to their benefit. One of the most important tools of a UX designer is a search engine. They need to be searching for data and analytics all the time. There are new trends every day, and falling behind them is not good for a business.
Fortunately, there are several tools for wireframing that UX designers can use. If you are not comfortable with the old-school way of using paper, you can use software like Adobe XD, Figma, or Balsamiq. Among these softwares, Balsamiq is the only one suitable for making lo-fi wireframes. It is a great app to just take your ideas out without having to worry about the lines looking neat or straight.
UX designers are the heart of a project. If the user experience of a product is designed in a bad way, it can cost your business more than paying for a good UX design. In case you would like to learn more about how your product can have a better user experience, you can contact our UX professionals at PengYi Labs, and have it done for you faster, easier, and more efficient than ever.
If you need help or advice, our professional team of designers and developers is ready and available for new web design and development projects.