Are you someone who is interested in working on user experience? Do you want to start your career or switch your career into building user experience but are not able to build the foundation you want? Read this blog from our budding UX Designer, Deepthi for how she's building her career in UX.
User Experience Design is as important as any other process of building a product. The user's needs of using that particular product are fulfilled with the product design. To keep the user loyal to the product, they should have positive experiences when using it and continue to use the product. Research says that every 1 dollar invested in User experience can give returns (ROI) up to 100 dollars(source). With such high returns expected, no company would want to continue their business without investing in it. With these basic facts and statistics about UX design, we shall discuss how to start your career as a skilled UX Designer.
In the process of exploring the answers to the questions like What is UX Design? Who are UX Designers? Why UX Design? Where to start? and How to start a career in UX designing? we shall discuss more on the role of UX Designer in any product and organization. UX Design is to focus on the journey of the user and their experience when using the product. This journey is based on research that can include data analysis, surveys, one on one or group interaction with the stakeholders, etc.
Let us take a general real-life example to understand what it means. When we want to construct a home, we explore other homes for reference, discuss with our family members the plan and then go to an architect for the floor plan. This floor and the basic plan of the house when done similarly for a software system can be considered as a UX design and the professional who does this is a UX designer.
Now with an understanding of what is UX design and who are UX designers, we shall speak about why UX design is important.
As said earlier, UX is important because it tries to fulfill the user’s needs. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the product or brand. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define customer journeys on your website that are most conducive to business success. The best products are good at both function and detail. Features are what draw people into our product. Details keep them there. And the details set our app apart from our competitors. Let us see how few of the companies give importance to UX.
Airbnb attributes good UX for taking them from being a near-failure to being valued at $10 million, LandRover has described UX as a must-have investment and Elon Musk was famously quoted saying that “any product that needs a manual is broken”. UX is now at the forefront of tech and is almost used interchangeably with good business.
Have you ever pressed the wrong button and then desperately turned pages to reach for the manual and tried to find a way to stop what it was doing? Or have you been very confused by downloading a new app and attending a tech forum to find many other confused users? If you answer "yes" to any of these scenarios, you are at the expense of a lower UX. A good UX should feel virtually invisible and the product should feel natural.
There are many reasons why UX can be bad, but UX and UI are usually easy to implement at any time, so nothing is acceptable to our business. Bad UX can take the form of introducing intrusive features to convince users to perform certain actions. This can lead the user to reach their final goal, but forcing the user to act can alert the user or be interpreted as annoying. It clearly shows that UX needs significant improvements if users need to dig deeper or get lost in the user flow to achieve what they want to achieve. Another Research made by Forrester research, states the importance of implementing the focus on customer research in the below diagram:
After reading so much, we are now very clear why UX design is needed and is important, we should be starting how to design an UX for a product.
The above image shows the key components of an iterative UX - UI design process. The product design keeps evolving as we keep interacting with the users and the product matures. By saying that we will have a detailed blog on the process in the future days, we shall move to the next question of how to start a career in UX design and what to read and learn for it.
There are a lot of books related to UX design, but I would suggest starting with these three books
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. In the book, the author has described why some products will please and some will be frustrated.
Don’t Make Me Think: A common-sense approach to web usability by Steve Krug. The book's premise is that a good software program or website should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible.
Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. The book continues the idea of "stickiness" popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, seeking to explain what makes an idea or concept memorable or interesting
At the same time, there are some amazing courses in Coursera where you can either audit the course or purchase it. They are
Learn Figma - UI/UX Essential training
User Experience Design Fundamentals
Introduction to User Experience Design
Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design
With having read the books and have done courses on UX design, you can now publish the work you have done during the process of learning in Dribble, Behance, LinkedIn, or in social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook. This is called building a portfolio and it helps in people seeing your work and recognizing you and thus helping you get a job.
With all these done, you would absolutely need a mentor who is well experienced and is an able guide to help you understand how to improvise your designs.
I hope this discussion has helped people who are looking for starting a career as a UX designer.
If you are someone who is wanting to hire a consultant for your application UX design or software architecture, we are always available to help you achieve the goals that your product needs and you reach success in retaining the loyalty of your customers.
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