UX Design Process: What you need to know

The term “UX design” has been around for like 100 years but most of us are still confused when hearing it. So the point of today article is to show you 4 important aspects of UX design:

• The definition of UX design.
• Why you need to focus on UX design.
• Designveloper’s UX design process.
• Some examples of UX design.

1. What is UX design?

User Experience (UX) design is the activity to create digital products (web app, mobile app, software, etc.) that give users seamless experiences when using it. This process of designing will provide easy-to-use, efficient, and fun moments to interact with. What’s more? UX designers have to make sure that users will find pleasure, amusement, and good experience in what they designed.

All in all, the Oxford Journal Interacting with Computer has put that: “The goal of UX design in business is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”

However, many other experts agree that there is no clear standard to defy a good user experience, instead, it should meet users’ needs in a specific context when they are using the web, app, etc.

As a bonus, here are some questions a UX designer should know to make sure their products are good in terms of user experience:

• Is the experience intuitive and smooth to use?
• Does its navigation feel logical?
• How does the user feel when using the product?
• Are all the actions easy and useful to perform and interact?

2. Why is UX design important?

a. Reduce cost

When a UX product is done well, bugs, usability issues or any other problems are limited. This happens due to the fact that a UX design process will focus on research, analyze and test all the actions.

It is said that there are only 20% of bugs found in a product are real issues. The rest 80% are usability problems and these things could be solved in the prototyping step of the UX design process.

That’s why a proper UX could save businesses hours of fixing redundant bugs, issues, and problems. And you know, time is money and no money should be spent unnecessarily.

b. Increase conversion rate

Maybe you have been in this situation before: surfed through an e-commerce site, and selected all the items you need but could not pay them with a common payment method. How annoying it was, right? So, just put yourself in users’ shoes. They will drop the cart and leave your site at once, find another supplier and probably never come back to you.

And this is where UX becomes vital to businesses, especially when it’s an e-commerce site or any business that depends on their online stores. If the product offers a smooth and effortless experience, more products/services are sold.

So here are 2 ways to increase conversion by improving and enhancing your website’s UX:

• Reduce the number of actions: the key lesson you should keep in mind is to make things perform quick. This solution will minimize the risk of frustrating your users when they cannot use the web/app as they wanted/expected.
• Design meaningful CTAs: a clean and clear call-to-action will dramatically increase your conversion rate. If you carefully place and draft their appearance, your CTAs are expected to be clicked on more. Our tip is that stating its purpose clearly. Those “click here” buttons are too vague and unattractive. Instead, you could use content like “Sign up for free” or “Let’s start a new project together”.

3. The suggested UX design process

There are a lot of factors that could affect your UX outputs, including usability, design/aesthetics, utility, performance, etc. And to make sure that these aspects won’t create any negative effect to your design, UX experts have conducted a standard UX design process which consists of 3 main steps. So, let’s dig in!

a. Research

Interview: It’s essential to conduct interviews with clients to consider initial requirements. However, before any meeting is held, you should use clients’ descriptions to do your own research. This may also help you come up with more brilliant ideas. At this stage, you should figure out: problems and issues your client is trying to solve; their goals; their target users; their competitors, etc.

Create various personas: Now that you have the set of data from the client and your own research, it’s time to create user personas, or in other words, representations of your end-users. These personas are tools that UX designers use to get familiar with their research.

Draft storyboards: you can skip this one but if time permits, drafting storyboards could help UX designers demonstrate users’ actions, the environment in which their actions happen.

Identify the customer journey map: the customer map (or experience map) will represent steps to made by users personas when they want to achieve something when using the site or the app. Thanks to this stage, UX designers are able to understand things such as user’s motivation, needs, and issues. This also helps designers figure out real obstacles and then solve or improve that very problem.

b. Sketch

Brainstorm ideas: this is where you style your UX flows, actions, and performance. Your brainstorming meeting should be between all stakeholders such as the designer team, the product managers, and technical experts.

Interaction Map: This very map will create the flow of how the product will navigate from this screen to another. For example, would it be a box pop up on the next screen or what button should appear now?

Draw wireframes: We could see wireframes as mockups for your website/app. They will show how elements (icons, buttons, CTA, texts, etc.) should be on the screen. Most of the time, designers will use whiteboards to sketch these. A wireframe merely includes shape, size, and position of elements.

Evaluate and re-draw: the last stage of this step is to test and evaluate the wireframe with all involved stakeholders and rework with those having issues.

c. Design

Paper prototyping: When you have the wireframes, it’s time to test the flow with a physical version of the wireframes. The testers or any stakeholders could really tap on the page and go through all the actions. There are various ways to create paper prototypes such as using sticky notes, printing out your designs, or using hand sketches. The most important thing to focus on is how good the interaction flow is, not colors or images.

High-fidelity design: this stage would take the team a ton of times since it’s time to put UX and UI design together. You will now create the appearance of the screens. Then, the development team will use that design to build the product.

4. UX examples

Above is the most simple UX design process. Now let’s move on and look at some examples of good UX design and bad UX design.

a. Good UX designs:

The first good UX example is from BE app — a newly-born Vietnamese ride-hailing app. Instead of making the user find and apply promotion codes themselves, this app helps its users by automatically using the code.

The next example is from Gmail. This email hosting will tell users that they need to give permission when attaching files from Google Drive. This feature will help you avoid sending wrong files to others.

b. Bad UX designs:

The first bad example is from a bank I am using right now. Their website’s UX is terrible since it keeps your account information (email and password) remembered on the browsers. This surely creates many chances for hackers to steal our accounts, money and worse, data.

Another bad UX design you may meet every day is to be asked for creating a super complex password. We do not only have to spend a lot of time on this but we also forget those complex passwords after several days. And then they ask us to change the password. No way. Speaking of good password requirements, Slack and Google should be the standard.

We at Designveloper hope this article will give you a better look at how a UX design process should be and some other terms.

Hey, don’t forget to give us your idea and we will help you estimate it. Designveloper has been on the market for 6 years now and our service has helped many businesses realize their ideas and make them come to life.

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