What is User Experience(UX) Design?
In this post, you will learn what do we mean by user experience design. What makes a product sellable and you will also get broader insights on why understanding the user is essential, be it any type of business.
By the end of this post, you will learn
What is User Experience(UX) Design?
The user experience is how a person, the user, feels about interacting with or experiencing a product. A product is a good, service, or feature. It might be a physical product, like a video game controller or a bag of potato chips, or a technology product, like an app, website, or smartwatch.
What makes a good ux design?
There are many things that can make up a good user experience. For example, for a user to have a good experience, the product needs to be usable, equitable, enjoyable, and useful.
Let's break that down. To begin, user experience is about improving usability or making something easier to use. This means that the design, structure, and purpose of the product are clear to everyone.
Usablility
To sell any product, first you need to make sure that the product is usable to a group of people. If nobody is going to use that product, nobody is ever going to buy it. And when you sell it, and resell it again and again you need to make sure that the product becomes more user-centric with each iteration.
"It isn't 10,000 hours that creates outliers, it's 10,000 iterations." - Naval Ravikant
Think about a ketchup bottle. Historically, ketchup came in a glass bottle. You had to hit the bottom of the glass to make ketchup come out. Often, no ketchup or too much ketchup would come out of the bottle.
Today, the ketchup bottle has been redesigned into a plastic squeezable bottle, which makes it easier to use and allows us to control how much ketchup comes out.
Equitability
UX designers need to think about every person who uses the product. This might include people with disabilities, or people with very different life experiences from your own.
For example, a user might find an app with a lot of text easy to use. On the other hand, a user with a visual impairment might want different features like sound.
Considering the unique needs of many different people is important work and thinking about equitable design is key.
Being equitable means your designs are useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities and backgrounds.
Enjoyability
User experience is also about making things enjoyable to use, which creates a positive connection between the user and the product.
UX designers foster that positive connection by taking a user's thoughts and feelings into account when making products.
Think about ordering food online. When you search for a restaurant on Swiggy or Zomato, you can see photos of dishes and read reviews from other people who have eaten there.
This experience is enjoyable because you can make a more informed choice about what to order, leaving you feeling happier about the product.
So, how do we figure out what makes a user happy with the product? That's where user research comes in.
To know how users feel, we have to collect evidence on how they're experiencing that product in real time and ask them about it, too.
Summing it up, and putting it in Naval's way, if you learn to build, (a useful product) and learn to sell (make the whole experience), you will be unstoppable
Usefulness
As humans, we want products that are useful, meaning they solve our problems.
For example, if you're lost, a map app telling you how to get home is useful. But if the app can't find your current location, it's not so useful anymore.
So now we know what it means for a user to have a good experience.
Why is it important to business?
In 2018, the research firm McKinsey & Company studied companies in three industries: medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking.
They found that, regardless of industry, businesses that focused on good usability and design performed better than their competitors.
Basically, it comes down to this: When people like a product, they use that product a lot, and they recommended it to their friends. And more people using the product means better business for the company.
Plus, when users have a good experience with the product, they're more likely to have a positive opinion of the company that made it. A win-win for the user and the business.
Can you think of a product you loved so much that you shared it with a friend?
If you did, that's a great example of user experience design in action.
Stay tuned for the next post which is about Career Paths in field of User Experience Design.
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