The Importance of Finding Your Ux Voice: A Never Ending Lesson
User experience is focused not just in design and visual appeal, but in the way that we as users and humans feel about products of all kinds. What do we like, what do we hate, what is easy to learn and what is completely impossible?
User experience can be read about, researched, and implemented in all different areas, across vast markets. From startups and non profits, to customer engagement and e commerce platforms, focusing on putting the user first, and making a memorable, engaged experience is a common goal.
The question is, how do we, as designers, explain our world to someone who doesn’t live and breathe it?
Your design process of course!
Personally, my process looks something like this:
I start with looking and the scope of the problem (if provided), outlining ways to make sense of constraints. Lots and lots of lists and brainstorming sessions. Walls covered with post it notes.
You know. The usual.
Next I start doing some light research, to get a sense of the space, and feel out what other competitors or products are doing. What works, what is flat out amazing, and what could be improved.
I might run some SWOT or heuristic testing if a company or client wants to redefine features or rethink an established design or digital product.
I compile that research data into a visuals. Something to present when going over the final results. Remember, in a lot of cases, documentation is everything.
Then comes the fun part. Ideation! Sketching and wire-framing always gets me in the problem solving mindset.
When I have some lo fi solutions, some ideas that I think reflect what I found in my research, I go onto persona building. That can be helpful on a million different levels, but it mostly helps me to remember not to design for myself. To put the concepts into someone else’s hands and make sure that every step of the way, I am designing with the user at the center of everything, not on the back burner.
Then I go into user interviews, pain points, more drawing and sketching, putting together digital lo fi prototypes to conduct usability testing.
And so on and so on and so on.
I could go on and on about what works best for me, why I think that there are some steps that are worth skipping, some parts of ux that I am still learning, like most of my peers transitioning into this discipline.
The main point is that the design process not only looks different for every designer, but it also is always situational! No matter what the content of the projects you are working on, and what a client is expecting, the cool part of ux is that there isn’t really a rule book.
There are best practices, of course. There are certain things that we always circle back to.
What I have learned so far, and what I keep focusing on in my own journey, is that as long as you can back yourself up, explain your thinking, and provide deliverable, presentable information about what you did and why you think it works, can anyone really tell you that you are wrong?
Sure, not everything that you design or work on is going to be the best. Not everything you create is going to be spot on.
But I think that having a little faith in yourself, and trying your hardest not to back step or overthink your choices, that’s what defines you as a designer, and that’s what defines the time and effort that you put into finding the right solution to whatever problem you are presented with.
When I talk about ux with friends or family, even some of those who work in the tech industry, there’s always this level of misunderstanding.
The more I learn, the more time I spend completely and totally immersed within this sphere, the more I grow to understand that part of the reason that ux holds so much appeal, at least for me, is because there’s no real end to what you can do and what you can create.
And that is a wonderfully hopeful thing.
