How UX Design Can Make Your Product a Delight

User Experience (UX) design is a discipline focused on improving the usability of digital and non-digital products using a foundation of design thinking that relies on auditing products, gathering user feedback, and designing wireframes and prototypes to inform product efficacy and reveal areas that will benefit from improvement.

Adobe puts it into plain English: “A UX designer’s role is directly involved in the process of making a product useful, usable and enjoyable for its users.”

Good product design isn’t just about having a pleasing graphic design, nowadays your primary concern needs to be on the user experience your product delivers.

What is User Experience?

You may not think of your customers or clients as “users” but to keep things simple, that’s how we’ll refer to them in this article.

The goal of good user experience is to make it easy for users to accomplish their desired tasks while minimizing frustration. When we talk about user experience here, we’re discussing a digital interface, like a website or a physical product or a service like Uber or Spotify.

Delivering the highest-level user experience means providing products and services that give users clear guidance to find or get what they need quickly without getting lost or frustrated along the way.

Why You Need a User Experience Design Process

Most companies want to build products or services that are intuitively designed so that users don’t feel like they’re having to struggle to use them. Good design is, as they say, invisible.  It just feels right, and you know it in your bones.

When you hear that phrase, “it’s really user-friendly,” you know you’ve delivered an exceptional user experience.  Users don’t have to understand design theory or the reasons behind why it works.  They just know it does.

The WE Actualize UX process follows a set of steps based on the principles of design thinking. To help your design team gather necessary data to produce an excellent product, you’ll do theoretical work plus you’ll put your prototype into the hands of real users who will inform your final product design.

Each step of the design phase is critical to the success of your project.

What Does Our UX Design Process Look Like?

Once a company has determined an area of need and a target audience they want to serve with a new digital or non-digital product, the team can implement a process to take the project from idea to ideation. Eventually, they’ll conduct user research and build prototypes to gather feedback and conduct usability testing.

Intent: In this initial phase, the UX designer will sit down with the product team to define and identify the problem this new product aims to address and to get an early view of the direction for the project. Or if the issue is product improvement, the designer will determine the project scope.

Inventory: What do you already know about your user behaviors and motivations? This is the phase where the product team will gather all the information about the user base and create personas and scenarios to inform further research efforts.

Insights: Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, feedback from users will be gathered. Depending on the product being created, the UX designer may create high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes to observe users interacting with the product interface.
Innovate:  The feedback received from users informs the product development needs, and it’s during this phase that the product team with brainstorm and create or improve new product features.

Implement: This is where the solution that best serves the needs of the user while meeting the goals of the provider is rolled out to the public. Small upgrades or tweaks may be made based on ongoing product feedback.

Why Should You Use a UX Designer?

Many businesses think that they can do their own design, but if you don’t ask the right questions or conduct the necessary research, you may release an expensive product that is ultimately rejected by the very users you were hoping to serve.

The UX design process is a complex one. UX designers work to maximize the adoption of your product by studying your users and their desires.

A UX designer is a professional who can help your organization design and build a product with pleasing user interfaces, seamless navigation, and product features. If you don’t have a UX designer on your team, it can be helpful to consider these issues as you begin creating new products and services. The professional skills a UX designer can bring to a project will set you up for even greater success, whether your project is in its earliest stages or already launched.

If you’re interested in creating or improving a product, consider hiring a UX designer to delight your product users and turn them into raving fans.