UX design is about creating positive user experiences when user interacts with a specific product, i.g. with a mobile app or a website. This experience is achieved by designing products, which answer prospective customers’ needs, and at the same time are fully functional, useful and easy to navigate.
Well designed UX can bring invaluable benefits to your product, and business as well (you can read how UX impacts on the business here). These are i.a. improving efficiency, gaining loyalty, customer retention, increase sales and the market share, lowering costs and so on.
Then how to create positive user experiences?
Process of creation starts from situation analysis, as understanding strategy and concept of the project should be always a work foundation. Having this knowledge and strategy vision enable us to define a problem and find accurate solutions, so we can use specific research methods. Selection of particular methods and research tools depends on time, budget and type of product.
Discover
User Interview - provides information based on real - prospective or existing users.
Competitive Audit - helps analyze the effectiveness of your competitors marketing efforts. Understand your competitors and discover which strategies work for them to gain an advantage.
Define and Design
User Persona - it’s a kind of representative, hypothetical character based on your ideal (current or perspective) customer. It allows you to get to know your target group, its problems, fears, expectations in order to design a product meeting needs.
Empathy Map - gives deep insights about behaviours and attitudes of your target group, likewise User Persona. We get into user’s shoes to analyze interacting with a product from user’s perspective.
User Flow - visually represents actions required to complete a task from user’s perspective. It helps to understand system and point out steps which need some improvement.
Wireframes - are low-fidelity, simplified models of your product, showing its general structure. It’s a great early-stage tool, providing a preview of the layout. At this stage you can adjust your product and develop its usability.
Prototyping - allows to test and validate a product before fully developing and launching the final version.
Validate
User testing - includes various aspects, i.a. usability testing (accomplishing certain tasks using a product) or A/B testing (comparing two forms of a product to choose the better performer). Conducting tests with potential users provides you a great feedback about design, flow and product features.
Analytics review - analyze user data and all information gathered to find out and solve usability issues to improve your product.
These are just some of the available research methods enabling to design a product corresponding with users expectations and your business strategy as well.
Conclusions
Getting to know your users, understanding their needs, habits and behaviours is essential to create a successful product that users like. Depending on your business goals, budget, time and experience - choose a relevant method (or combine more) and apply into your designing process to make right choices.
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