UX designers focus on all aspects of product development, including design, ease of use, features, and even branding and marketing. Their work touches on the entire end-to-end journey of users interacting with the product, including identifying new opportunities for the product and business.
What do UX designers do every day?
The UX design process has several important aspects that are a collection of core activities and responsibilities that make up most of the day-to-day work of a UX designer. According to the BrainStation Digital Skills Survey 2020, UX designers spend a lot of time in each of the following categories:
User survey
Many people don’t understand how much research UX design requires. In fact, market, product, and user research is an important part of UX design, and research is essential to understanding users and their individual needs. User surveys often focus on customer behavior, motivation, and the need to help designers see what opportunities exist in a particular market for product solutions. Survey methods commonly used by UX designers to gather information and insights about target users include data collection, surveys, user interviews, and focus groups.
Persona Development
Another crucial step in the UX design process is creating user personas. UX Designers consolidate and analyze their results at this step to create representative personas based on trends and commonalities discovered during their research. Each persona provides a possible user’s demographic information, motives, wants, probable replies, and anything else that Developers should think about—a great tool that helps the organization get a better sense of who they’re designing the product for.
Information Architecture (IA)
Information architecture refers to how information is laid out and organized to imply a clear purpose—in other words, how the information is explored. IA, according to Adobe, is “the construction of a structure for a website, app, or other product that lets users to understand where they are in respect to the content they desire.” With this blueprint in hand, the design team can begin creating wireframes and prototypes to optimize how consumers encounter, move through, and engage with the product or site.
Wireframing
As one of the first steps toward building the final product, UX Designers create wireframes—lowfidelity design sketches that represent different screens or stages of the product throughout the user journey. The wireframe contains a simple representation of UI design elements that serve as a guide for further development and product design.
Prototyping and fidelity design
Compared to wireframes, prototypes are a more detailed design of the product that can be used for user testing or demonstrating the product to the development team. UX designers have created these prototypes with a look and feel and set of features that are very similar to the planned final product. Clickable prototypes allow people to interact with the product throughout the testing phase. This allows UX designers to experiment with practical variations of the experience and identify areas for improvement.
User test
UX designers can test their products in a variety of methods. One of the most prevalent methods is user testing, which is allowing users to interact with a prototype of the final design in order to assess its accessibility, usability, and intuitiveness. Other methods, such as focus groups, moderated user testing, and unmoderated user tests, can also provide useful information about what is and isn’t functioning. Finally, product testing is one of the most important processes in determining what modifications should be made as development progresses.