User Experience Design
User Experience Design (UXD, UED) is a productive approach placing the user centre stage, and focusing development on the actual users' needs.
The ultimate aim is to provide a rewarding experience for the target audiences, one that users would gladly re-visit, and recommend to others.
This is achieved by optimising a website around how users can, want, or need to use it, rather than forcing them to change their behaviour.
Which means that the final site is more intuitive and easier to use enabling users to accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently, providing a great user experience.
Complementing well the core values of agile development methodologies the five key principles of User Experience Design are:
Involving users from the beginning
Treating them as an integral part of the design process and team
Knowing your users
Finding out who your users are and creating personas
Analysing user tasks and goals
Finding out what your users goals are, what they need and expect from the site, and creating user journeys
Experimenting
Being flexible and adaptable, exploring various approaches and designs by continuously testing with users
Testing, testing and testing some more
Usability testing throughout the design cycle must be an iterative process where every step is evaluated against the initially identified requirements of the users and iterated until these requirements are met
We keep these principles firmly in mind throughout the design and development process, which usually takes us through the following stages:
- Research: Creating personas and learning about the people who use or are going to use the website, and the context in which they'll use it. A variety of techniques are used to understand the target audience including ethnography, observation, interviews, focus groups, benchmarking and online tracking.
- Conceptualisation: Understanding user needs, business needs, and overall organisational objectives; coming up with innovative solutions to address and align those needs; and creating the first design concepts. It is crucial to conduct concept testing sessions with target users at this stage.
- Iterative design: Using a variety of prototyping techniques (from sketches and card sorting exercises, through to large interactive prototypes) the usability of early concepts is tested through a series of repeat cycles, each feeding into and refining the next. Through this process we refine usability, information architecture and visual design in detail; ensuring that the final user experience is simple and enjoyable.
- Implementation: Working closely with the implementation team, and using extensive testing and heuristic evaluations, is the only way to ensure the concept is implemented as intended.
- Launch: Last but not least, this phase needs to be carefully managed to ensure users experience a smooth transition from any legacy site. Once live, it's important to get information about real use, gathering user feedback and metrics.
Contact us now to discuss how you can provide a rewarding experience to your target audiences through User Experience Design.
