UX Design guides the intentional creation of experiences that provide meaningful and relevant value to participants. This involves the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product or event, including aspects of design, branding, usability, functionality, and the ethics of its use.
What is UX Design?
When we practice experience design, we do so to add value to the world in the form of human satisfaction, a desire to improve, and identity.
Human Satisfaction
When choices arise from human needs and expectations, design can create positive engagement, increased efficiency, and a greater retention of people using products and services. People feel good about their interaction.
Desire To Improve
UX Design seeks to ground our decisions in the experiences of others and reveal insights to generate new solutions to evolving challenges.
We encourage ongoing evolution of both tools and ideas through data analysis and human testimonials.
Identity
Design also serves to distinguish our products and services from others through innovation and branding.
This includes visual and functional attributes, but also the purpose and care for the communities we foster.
To generate these values, UX designers apply a number of skill-based processes to a design challenge, most notably:
- Design Thinking
Adopt a holistic approach to identify and address transformational challenges. Design thinking is characterized by curiosity, inclusivity, ethical responsibility, and cross-functional collaboration. - User Experience Research
Understand the needs and challenges of people we are trying to serve, through design inquiries such as surveys, usability testing, data analysis, and stakeholder groups. The primary functions of UX research are to challenge presumptions and identify needs grounded in behavior. - Prototyping
Generate low- and high-fidelity representations of a design solution as proofs-of-concept. These representations address the intended interaction flow, visual language, information architecture, and experience narratives. The primary functions of prototypes are refinement and communication. - Learning
Promote a culture of continuous engagement with thoughts and practices of professional peers by encouraging participation in industry conferences, media consumption, community discussions, and experimentation.
These processes always work better within collaborative teams of designers and non-designers.