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What is UX Design? Overview Dimensions and Elements

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Design Tips & Resources UI/UX

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osmanassem

In this post we will take about the UX design which is the science behind the placement of each elements in the UI design. In case you want to understand more about UI design, check the post What is User interface (UI) design? Conventions and Elements.

Definition:

User Experience Design (UXD or UED) is that the way, process, approach or science of designing web and mobile applications. The importance of UX design is it makes digital products to perform based on the human usability science so it turn the product to be useful, usable meaningful, delightful, relevant, easy to use and interactive.

Example: If you consider a product or application as the human body, its structure, and organs by nature represent to UX.

Explanation:

When a product is being developed or designed, people pay attention to how it work and what it does? UX is another thing that show how the product works? It’s objective to design a system that enhance end-users experience and removes obstacles and frictions from the desired goal. Where user can easily achieve their task by taking minimal steps. In other words, UX helps end-users’ to easily use and interact with digital products.

Dimensions and Elements :

UX is a large term that has many dimensions, areas, and elements, it consists of user’s personas, UX research, Information architecture(IA) or User-flows or sitemap, Hierarchical task analysis (HTA), Wireframing or Sketching(skeleton), UX writing, Interactive prototypes, Visual design(low fidelity design), Testing.
Similarly, UX consists of a bunch of different dimensions (disciplines) such as Usability Learnability, Accessibility, Desirability, Functionality, Interaction, Innovation, Iteration, Visually appealing, Vision, Emotions, Content strategies, Users needs at the center of the design, Solve design problems and human-computer interaction. Some important elements and dimensions will be defined below.

Personas: Personas are precise descriptions of the system’s users. Who is going to use your system and what he/she wants to accomplish? Personas clearing the question, “Who are we designing for?

UX Research: In UX research we understand end-users needs and the main purpose of the application. UX research helps us to identify new design ideas under user-centered design. There are two types of UX research.

Qualitative research: In this research, we focus on users’ actual behavior (why, what, how)  for gaining an in-depth of human decision making.

Quantitative research: In this research, we focus on mass data collection and a sense of attitudes (what, where, when).

Information architecture: Information architecture (also known as IA) is the foundation for great web design, mobile design, and any other software. Information Architecture shows a complete road map or site map of your application. It is a visual diagram and hierarchy of a website’s pages. Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, prioritizing and labeling content.

Hierarchical task analysis: A hierarchical task analysis (also known as HTA) provides an understanding of the steps taken by users to achieve a certain goal. It is a structured, objective approach in which we have to breakdown a task in sub-tasks. It expresses the relationships between the parent task and its subtasks through a numbering scheme.

Wireframing:  A wireframe is a sort of “skeleton” for the new website. Wireframing usually lacks typographic, color and graphics style, its main focus lies in functionality, behavior, layout,  priority of content. The wire-framing show all of the pages that will be included in the website, and all items that will be on each page.

Prototyping:  A prototype is an early high fidelity sample, model or simulation of the product with interactive links, built to test our digital products.

Usability:  Usability just means makes a product who works well. Usability allows end-user to accomplish their tasks in an effective and efficient way.

Learnability: Learnability can be defined as is the product simple to master quickly with minimal instruction required?

Accessibility: Accessibility of a product describes its easiness and users’ ability to use products/services.

Human-computer-interaction (HCI): Human-computer interaction is concerned with interaction, design, and evaluation of computer systems used by humans.

Importance of UX Design:

Sometimes a product looks great but difficult to use because of its great UI (User interface Design) and poor UX, So UX is important and necessary because of the following reasons.

1) UX Design provides a positive experience for end-user
2) UX Design decrease your development costs
3) UX Design Improves the quality of products
4) UX Design help in site SEO.
5) UX Design helps to win the consumers’ confidence.

Role of UX Design in Business:

Everyone knows the primary goal of any business is to increase its sales. UX Design does not just make your application easy and interactive but it also grows your business so it plays an essential role in growing and achieving our business targets. The goal of UX Design in business is to improve end-user satisfaction and loyalty by improving the usability, ease of use in the interaction between the customer and the product.

If your site or an application consists of web pros, then UX asks to you make the product useful, usable, valuable, effective and communicative, meaningful and relevant.
For this reason, we need (i) UX value loop (UX Design is just not a concern with information and end-user need but it insists on being very selective for growing our business) and ( 2) UX co-principal(Value goes up and comes back in the form of revenue ).

Good UX Design happens when we make some effective decisions in a way that understands and fulfills the needs of both our users and our business. UX provides the following benefits in business
1) UX Design grow your business
2) UX Design increase the conversion rate
3) UX Design increases revenue.
4) UX Design Keep users loyal to the product or brand
5) UX Design increase your sell rate.

History of UX term:

In the late 1940s UX term was called  “interaction between human users and machines” but in the 1990s a Cognitive psychologist and designer ” Don Norman”  introduced the term “user experience”.
Don Norman was a cognitive scientist who joined the designing team at Apple in the early 90s as a User Experience Architecture. He invented the term “User Experience Design” as he explains, “I invented the term UX because I thought the human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics design, interface design, product design the physical interaction, and the manual”.After 2005 UX became a popular-word and proper field. Now great software houses have a separate department and team of UX design. 

Resources:

geeksinux.com

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