UI & UX Design
Design and User Experience
What Is User Experience (UX) Design?
User experience (UX) refers to any interaction a user has with a product or service. UX design considers each and every element that shapes this experience, how it makes the user feel, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their desired tasks. This could be anything from how a physical product feels in your hand, to how straightforward the checkout process is when buying something online. The goal of UX design is to create easy, efficient, relevant and all-round pleasant experiences for the user.
What is user interface (UI) design?
User interface design is a purely digital practice. It considers all the visual, interactive elements of a product interface—including buttons, icons, spacing, typography, color schemes, and responsive design.
The goal of UI design is to visually guide the user through a product’s interface. It’s all about creating an intuitive experience that doesn’t require the user to think too much!
UI design transfers the brand’s strengths and visual assets to a product’s interface, making sure the design is consistent, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing.
Useful-Factors that Influence User Experience
If a product isn’t useful to someone why would you want to bring it to market? If it has no purpose, it is unlikely to be able to compete for attention alongside a market full of purposeful and useful products. It’s worth noting that “useful” is in the eye of the beholder and things can be deemed “useful” if they deliver non-practical benefits such as fun or aesthetic appeal.
Usable-Factors that Influence User Experience
Usability is concerned with enabling users to effectively and efficiently achieve their end objective with a product. A computer game which requires 3 sets of control pads is unlikely to be usable as people, for the time being at least, only tend to have 2 hands. Products can succeed if they are not usable but they are less likely to do so. Poor usability is often associated with the very first generation of a product – think the first generation of MP3 players; which lost their market share to the more usable iPod when it was launched. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player but it was the first truly usable MP3 player.
Findable-Factors that Influence User Experience
Findable refers to the idea that the product must be easy to find and in the instance of digital and information products; the content within them must be easy to find too. If you cannot find a product, you’re not going to buy it and that is true for all potential users of that product. If you picked up a newspaper and all the stories within it were allocated page space at random, rather than being organized into sections such as Sport, Entertainment, Business, etc. you would probably find reading the newspaper a very frustrating experience. Findability is vital to the user experience of many products.
Credible-Factors that Influence User Experience
Credibility relates to the ability of the user to trust in the product that you’ve provided. Not just that it does the job that it is supposed to do but that it will last for a reasonable amount of time and that the information provided with it is accurate and fit-for-purpose. It is nearly impossible to deliver a user experience if the user thinks the product creator is a lying, clown with bad intentions – they’ll take their business elsewhere instead.