UX Introspection

What exactly is expected out of UX is a question that will have many answers. Before understanding UX requirements, defining and understanding the concept of UX is mandatory as well.

User Experience (UX) is somewhat of an elusive notion with many different definitions, even among the UX community themselves. There is user experience involved in all product and service design the focus here is purely on digital user experience.

The Role Of UX

While the design team definitely has a crucial role when it comes to user experience, it’s not something only designers have to worry about. Everybody involved in the creation through sales of a product should be thinking about UX.

Collaborating with the UX department can yield benefits for everyone involved. For example, learning about UX can help marketers better understand their customers. Having an understanding of UX in different channels can also help marketers optimize their materials for each of the channels they use.

This, in turn, will make the lives of designers easier, because they won’t have to redesign products that weren’t made with consumers in mind. It will also lead to better, more popular products because the products will be geared towards the customers.

When marketers collect data on their campaigns, they can also share that information with UX designers, especially if they determine UX may have been a factor in the effectiveness of a campaign. This can help both marketers and UX designers improve their work.

Thinking about user experience is something that needs to be integrated into company culture and the whole process of how a company does business.

ISO 9241-210 defines user experience as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”.

The problem with this definition is that it still leaves so much to interpretation. Designing the user experience is a combination of an art and science with many “rules” actually being guidelines based on user behaviors during testing.

So, instead of defining UX, we list out 10 questions that will help you understand UX better. The individual answers to these questions will lead to a better definition of UX in your mind.

So, before starting a UX project, ask yourself these questions because the definition of UX is ever evolving and changes from project to project.

The Questions To Be Asked

1. Who is the website intended for? If the website already exists, what kinds of users does it already have, if any?

2. What information exactly needs to be communicated to these users for the website’s function to be considered successful?

3. Are the intended users or the message likely to change in the future, and if so at what rate and degree?

4. What are your motivations for working on the UI?

5. In particular, how do your motivations differ from the those of the intended users? How do they differ from those of anyone else working on other aspects of the site?

6. What is your budget for the work at hand, in terms of both money and time?

7. Do you have the freedom to try unconventional solutions, or are standard ones more appropriate to the context?

8. Who owns the UI once you have “finished” working on it? Will others need to change it independently?

9. How closely coupled is working on the UI taking into account technical limitations the development process?

10. Are you in the right frame of mind to create world class UX?

Keep these questions in your mind every single mind and the final product will be more user engaging thanks to your honest answers and better understanding of the user requirements.