What is UX?

3 min readOct 29, 2018

User experience (UX) is the value that a product is providing to its users when they interact with it.

User experience design is itself a process that enhances user satisfaction when he uses a product by providing efficient, usable and relevant experience to him to achieve his goals. The role of a UX designer is to provide great user experience to users while he is designing a product.

Why it matters?

UX has become a key standard in developing software products. Great user experience not only highlights and promotes a product, but it also plays an important role in building and growing customer confidence.

You can have a great product with a compelling content, but without an appealing user experience, you may not be able to achieve your business goals.

What does it include?

Good user experience design is part of the product development process. It includes:

Understanding of requirements
Interaction with users
Building and following guidelines and standards
Learning about tools
Building sketches, images, prototypes
Testing of design

The ultimate goal is to build a unique combination of structure, content, and experience that helps the user to accomplish his goals efficiently.

Skillset required to do UX design

UX designing requires a number of skills that can be learned and made part of your design journey.

1. Research:

A must skill for UX designers is to do research.
Keep yourself up to date to the latest trends.
Explore upcoming designs, techniques, and tools in your field.
Compare the knowledge that you are attaining each day and see how quickly things are evolving.

2. Thinking like user:

Learn about your user.
Work with your user and get his feedback to create the best possible solution.
Observe the user in his working environment.
Relate the problem to daily life situations and see how they handle them.
Collect your findings and think of the design you want to build for them.
Never try to make design decisions based on your own likes and dislikes.

3. Problem-solving:

Design always solves a well-defined problem.
Understand the problem of your user.
Devise a plan to solve it.
Implement your plan and analyze the results.
If you are satisfied with your outcomes, involve your user.
Repeat this process until you get a masterpiece that satisfies your user and worth what it costs.

4. Patience:

Patience is a key skill of a UX designer.
Design work requires many iterations as well as criticism.
Each time you iterate your design, you will learn a hundred of new things.
Note the things that you like in each iteration and DO them again. List down the DONT’S of each iteration, and do not repeat them again.
If you are not liking your work, no worries. Let give it another try with new passion using the past experiences.
Take criticism positively. It will help you to expand your way of thinking.

5. Creativity:

A good research habit improves your thinking through new and innovative ideas.
Always feel the courage to try new and different things in your design, while following the standards at the same time.
Do brainstorming on your ideas with people around you.
Keep your design simple by focusing on important and required features.
The real experience comes where you provide required features and a simple design at the same time.

6. Attention to details:

Don’t leave gaps in your design.
Cover all possible scenarios that a user may encounter.
A design can best be evaluated with the small interactions that it provides to users when some error occurs or when something gets stuck.
An extensive observation skill is needed for this.

7. Effective communication:

A powerful communication helps you to present your ideas effectively.
You should know how to convince people, how to get information from them, and how to market your value.

Conclusion
Learning these skills will allow you to create designs that are clean, simple, intuitive, flexible and engaging, and provide a WOW experience to your users, and thus differentiates you from your competitors.