Hello everyone!
Why does UI / UX journey become such a crucial point? The reason is a good user interface will not only attract the users but also turn your potential visitors into the buyers of your web or mobile application. When it comes to UX design, it can be called the most significant part because it improves the experience of the product for users.
What is the UI/UX journey? Here we can identify six stages as understanding your user, research, analyze, design, implement, and evaluate stage.
- Understanding your user
This stage is a crucial one. This is just as important as the foundation of a building. If you didn’t understand your user properly how would you be able to satisfy your user with your designs? First of all, we have to understand users’ pain points which means what is their problem, and how we are going to solve that problem.
- Research
This stage is also as important as the previous one. In the previous stage, we tried to understand the user but here we try to figure out what are the questions that we are going to solve. For this, there are several methods that we can use.
- Surveys
Here we can give some questionnaires to users to find out what are their attitudes towards the product. UX surveys will provide you with valuable information that would help to improve the user experience.
But when we design the questionnaires we have to consider,
- Clearly understand the goal of making a questionnaire
- Design neutral and simple questions that are easy to answer
- Respect your users’ privacy
- Try to ask one concept for one time
- Design questions to get quality data
- Usability testing
Usability testing can be identified as a very popular UX research method these days. This means we can use our users as an audience to understand their user experience. Here, we can give them applications to use and ask about their experience. So we would be able to observe how users
react to the application, what are the problems that arise when they use the application, what are possible solutions we can give them for.
- Testing plan
Here we have to identify the features, functionalities, and tasks of our system and how we are going to measure the success or failures of these features and functionalities, and are our functionalities user friendly.
- Analyze
In this stage, we analyze all the data that we have gathered in previous stages. We can create personas and user journey maps to analyze our data.
User personas
- What are user personas?
Creating user personas will help you to understand things about users like their goals, background, age, gender, behavior patterns, pain points, skills, and attitudes. You can also add some fictional information to turn it into a real character.
- So why do we use user personas to analyze?
User personas answer the main questions like for whom do we design this solution. We all know empathy is a core value that designers should have to understand our end-users. So by creating personas you will be able to get perspectives similar to users, to understand different needs and expectations of users, and to guess what a real person might need. Even though personas are not real they should be realistic.
- When you design personas,
Collect the details about users
Understand their goals and needs
Understand their behavioral patterns
Tide up personas with imagined situations and scenarios
User journey maps
This is a representation of the users’ interaction with our products. A user journey map would be useful to building empathy, to provide a common picture, to make focus you, and to reveal opportunities. UXPressia, Lucidchart, Microsoft Visio, and Gliffy are some tools that you can use for user journey mapping.
Design
In this stage, before we start to create our designs, we have to create wireframes. This is also called low fidelity version of your designs. Here we have to create site maps, user flow diagrams, mockups, icons, and also color pallets. You have to focus on what are the colors and fonts you are going to use and you have to experiment with different layouts.
- Creating a prototype
We design prototypes to test the design concept and today you would be able to find multiple ways to design prototypes. Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, InVision Studio, and Webflow are some tools that you can use for prototyping.
- Implement the solution
After your client accepts your design, we can implement the design into a web or mobile application.
- Evaluate
After your project is launched, it would be wise to analyze your project again. In this stage, you have to evaluate your overall final product. You have to think about what are the points that you struggle with and the causes for them, how your users interact with your product, how you improve this product more.
What are the standards that you should follow?
- Reduce learning
Your designs should have consistency. This means your elements are uniform and look and behave in the same way. Therefore your designs should have consistent navigation, consistent control elements, and consistent page layouts. You should have to stick to one visual identity. As an example, your home page and other pages should have the same fonts, icons, elements, and colors. Otherwise, it will look like its two different web pages and the user will get confused.
- Designing an efficient layout
Here you have highlighted the important things and encouraged the user to take action. When it comes to visual hierarchy, hierarchy is a way of letting know the user where their eyes should be focused on. This is like designing important things that should be focused on bigger and brighter
than other elements. If you used the right hierarchy user would feel easy to understand the content immediately. You have to use whitespace which is also called a negative space to give some relief and relax to users’ eyes.
- Use real-world metaphors
When you see the garbage bin icon, you know that when you place something there it would be removed. So when you use this kind of icons user can understand them even at their first glance.
4. Providing informative feedback
When you design a password field in a form, you have to provide information for how strong users’ passwords. Users should be able to know if their password is weak or strong enough. So you have to give them feedback.
However, understanding the UI/UX process and following them, you will be definitely able to fulfill your users’ needs and provide them a great user experience as well as make the user stick to your product.
Thank You…
