What is User-Experience Design & Why is it Valuable for Your Project?

Usually when you explain that you’re a user-experience designer to someone, they raise a single eyebrow and nod slowly. It’s one of those terms that often becomes misconstrued as merely “UI design,” or confused solely with usability design. In reality, UX design encompasses much more than a single aspect of a project; in fact, it governs the creation of everything that someone will see and interact with as an end-user. In the case of a simple website, this may not sound like much more than what a web designer would do, and that’s very close to the truth as the two roles can be very similar and come from similar backgrounds. However, the larger and more complex the system, the more integral it becomes to have a dedicated UX professional.

User-experience design is the practice of defining the boundaries that create and shape the overall experience a user has when using an interactive system. It involves the creation of every single element in a holistic, unified and streamlined approach to the system’s design, from the initial research and planning, to how and where users will interact with a system, and what it looks like.

The nature of the job is such that UX designers are accustomed to wearing multiple hats when developing and delivering a project, typically being responsible for a number of different areas all at once:

Research Development and Process Creation

No matter the project, as a designer you will have a tried and true creative process that you stick to. That process should include a research phase where you are looking at relevant work, creating competitive analysis reviews, and summarizing findings into easily digestable, concise documentation. The same focus applies to UX design; research leads to an effective design process and provides easy justification for the avenues you have taken.

Process creation requires you to define and track the creative development of your project. As mentioned later, the UX designer is often responsible for the functional, interactive and aesthetic portions of a project, and identifying and clarifying the process to your team helps to keep the project within scope, feature-creep within set-windows of time, and unexpected iteration to a minimum.

In the end, you reduce iteration cycles, and streamline key processes while providing a foundation for effective, creative design work.

System Planning and Information Architecture

The system plan can be seen as a mixture of quantitative and qualitative high-level views of the entire project. From a technical standpoint, the system plan outlines all of the functional components and chunks of content that are involved, and maps out their relationships to one another in a clear and concise manner. It is also intended to ensure the goals and requirements of the project are maintained throughout, while the high-level picture of what the user will experience is defined.

The information architecture side focuses on the navigational elements as well as the granular arrangement and organization of all content. This means on a macro level, the design of the navigation system is created to link all of the content together, while the micro-process sees each chunk of content positioned in context to one another.

This helps create a fluid, intelligible experience for end users, where they won’t get lost, and content is easily accessible.

Interaction Design

With the high-level picture of a project defined, and the navigation tools and
structure outlined, the UX designer will create (and sometimes implement)
each interactive element that end users are going to encounter. This can be seen as functional design, and the creation, layout and behavior of the interactive features used throughout the project, such as the individual navigation components, unique feature assets, forms and templates, etc…

Not to be confused with interface design, this role is all about behavior development for users, ensuring that the project is quick, easy and effective. Instead of aesthetic concerns, the designer is focused on design patterns, gray-box implementation and placeholder content, all while ensuring there are no usability flaws in the design work. Usability is another catchy design term, sometimes referred to as “look & feel”, or user-feedback. In reality, the usability of a project is the ease and speed with which a new user can both learn and use a system.

With that said, here the UX designer ensures that the experience will be consistent, responsive, and approachable for all targeted users.

Interface Design

The UI (or user-interface) is the actual visual construct that a user sees and interacts with as they navigate a system. Its design is comprised of a number of over-arching design principles that define the look and feel of the experience; the visual language, aesthetic, colors, animation presentation etc…

More heavily stressed during the tail end of a project, the UI design ties together all of the steps in the creative process up to that point, uniting them under a single, consistent approach. The research phase is just as important here, ensuring visual appeal, and that the project is not dated or feels cumbersome to use. As a general rule of thumb, clean and concise artwork is often an effective approach to maintain the intended streamlined feel of a system.

Here, visual consistency, detail, and appeal help to ensure a project is as effective and enjoyable as possible.

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