User experience is an umbrella term that incorporates too many components in delivering the best website experience to the users. The term UX and UI design are often very confusing. UX is a really a broad concept and UI influences it to some extent. Let’s take a look at some of the basics yet very crucial UX design rules to consider in every type of design.
UX is not UI
Most of the clients you would work with can be seen muddling up about the term UX and UI design. An adept designer should be able to explain it to their clients how User Interface is different from User Experience. The user interface is the actual system that users interact with. The layout design of your Android settings menu is an example of the user interface.
However, User Experience is about imparting emotions to the interface design. A well-crafted UX evokes emotions during the interaction. User Experience is all about the user’s satisfaction with an easy-to-use menu design.
UX Creates Goal Driven Design
Being a designer, you must have had dealt with clients that insist on how to customize the design according to their need. This might be discomforting as the client’s choice might not be a suitable way to solve some specific problem.
Consider an example; suppose your client wants you to add a CTA button to the top right corner of the website. However, you think that CTA when placed in the center, might perform better. In such cases, being open to your ideas can result in a better UX outcomes.
UX Represents your Brand
It might sound usual to say “design for the user,” because UX is all about the end users. However, a number of web designers are often the victim of their own creation. Their design may contain all the industry standard UI components and even meet the client’s requirements but might still not deliver as per the user’s needs.
To battle this out, you need to make sure you’re on the right track, you might also need to learn some guidelines pertaining to the user-driven designs. A good rule of thumb is to start by researching different types of users and mapping out how they use the site you’re working on.
A good way to go is by researching about the user needs and then employing those principles for UX. Additionally, you might need to perform A/B testing on different devices to ensure it performs well.
Determine Behavioural Triggers
A quality UX design makes use of the user psychology. Moreover, UX designers not only learn from users’ tendencies but can also trigger new behavior for better conversions. But wait! Things might sometimes go wrong as well. Let’s talk about the notifications for an instance.
Sometimes, a bunch of notification in the tray might annoy users. They’re meant to seek user’s involvement. But doing the activity consumes a bit of time.
The objective of UX is to figure out how users’ responds to the notifications so that you can time your notifications accordingly.
Receiving a notification on the way to work might not do good because the user has some other priority work. But the same notification delivered at some other time might have the different result as now the user has ample of time to engage in the behavior.
Conclusion
While UX is different from the UI, every designer must be able to figure out the differences. Moreover, UX design incorporated boundless terms of references while polishing a website. A proper balance between the client’s need and the user goals is often the need of a perfect UX project. In short, we can say that a better UX is all about easing the user’s accessibility and at the same time achieving your design goals.
