What is UX Design?

What does a UX designer do?

The UX designer's mission is to develop products that fit perfectly in people's lives, products that have a human-centered approach, and help users achieve their goals. UX designers work on making computer-human interactions as smooth and “human” as possible.

Business goals vs and Users Goals

A UX designer takes into consideration the business goals just as much as the user’s goals. A good UX designer will try to find the sweet spot of merging the needs and goals of the two. This needs spending a lot of time on solution-seeking and paying attention to both sides constantly, and knowing what to prioritize.

Why is UX design more important now?

As we develop our lives more and more around technology and digital products, we now rely on digital products a huge amount. We use digital products to keep in touch with our families, to buy our meds, to check on our loved ones, to order a taxi, to order food at 2 AM, even to vote.

The digital life

We count on digital products to solve small to huge problems, and we have millions of products to choose from. The business/product competition is higher than it’s ever been and good user experience makes all the difference. Book recommendation: “About Face, The Essentials of Interaction Design”, Alan Cooper

What counts as bad UX design?

We expect to use products to solve our problems in the easiest and fastest way possible. We don't want to think about how to use a product. We have mental models on how products should look and behave and we apply those all the time when we use any product. Learn more about this in "The Design of Everyday Things", Don Norman; "Don't Make Me Think”, Steve Krug

The harsh truth

A UX designer needs to find out what are those mental models and develop experiences according to their findings. If products and digital products are hard to use, if they disturb people’s lives, users will not want to use those products, and that’s just the truth.

Exercise: Bad and Good UX design

By comparing different designs, let's see what is the design that has good UX and bad UX. Let's use this cool website to do this the easiest way https://cantunsee.space ![7]

The design on the right counts as "bad UX", because of all the color inconsistency, low contrast and bad contrast for the text, and bad choice of fonts, design inconsistency for the speech bubbles.

The design on the left counts 👈 as bad UX because of its inconsistent corners. Also, the name doesn't have the proper font weight to create good contrast.

The design from the left counts 👈 as bad UX because of the speech bubble padding for "Okay!" is way too big and doesn't adjust its size according to the size of the inside text.

This one may not seem so obvious to new designers, the image on the left counts 👈 as bad UX because of its destructive action button color. Red is a better choice of color for something that "ends" something, and blue would be a good color for answering a call, not ending one.

The right image's design 👉 counts as bad UX, because the button's actions have different importance, and should not attract the same level of attention, therefore they should have a different style. The action for "Invite friends" is more important than "Skip" in this case.

The image on the right 👉 counts as bad UX because the icons don't have design consistency. Some are filled, some are outlined. This can create confusion in the user's mind, resulting in them mistaking some icons as active or inactive.

Conclusion

So, next time when you read about UX design or somebody asks what UX design is, know that it's a term that covers a broad aspect of things from research and design, to how users interact with products and a lot more. That's a good start 👍