The importance of UX Design and its various opportunities

User Experience, or UX, is something that hasn’t exactly been at the forefront of business and product development in the past. At many startups or up and coming businesses, job openings for UX Designers and Researchers haven’t been a priority. However, UX is now starting to come into a light as a crucial process. UX and User Centered Design should be one of the vital concepts for product development, brainstorming, manufacturing and testing as at the end of the day, the user is your source of income.

What is User Experience?

The simple definition of UX is how a person (the user) feels about interacting with, or experiencing, a product. However, to properly understand this practice, we must break it down into the different perspectives.

From the perspective of the consumer, UX is how they interact with, and feel about using this specific product. This could include how easy it is to use, how equitable it is, how useful it is and how enjoyable it is.

From the perspective of the designer, UX design is the process of creating products that provide useful, relevant and usable experiences to users, with the end goal being user satisfaction after interacting with the product. This includes the process of finding a problem to solve with your product, brainstorming ideas to solve it, implementing these ideas into a prototype, testing it with users, tweaking your prototype using the feedback from testing and launching the final product.

The product development life cycle (PDLC) is the process used to take a product from an idea to reality. The project behind most products starts out with a team trying to solve a problem: how to develop a product that provides the best UX. UX designers, researchers and writers play a huge role in this process. The steps are as follows:

1.     Brainstorm- An active discovery stage that incorporates generating ideas about the user and potential needs or challenges the user might have. During this stage, the team generates ideas for UX, understands its audience, and identifies their needs.

2.     Define- This stage includes using insights from the brainstorm stage and starting to narrow the focus. The team starts to determine concrete ways that the product being developed will impact the user.

3.     Design- Encompasses implementing insights into new designs for prototype/product, using various tools. Team generates designs that keep the user at the top of mind (wireframes, storyboards, prototypes).

4.     Test- Evaluating the product design based on the feedback of potential users. Testing the design with users helps the team focus on users first and foremost, and the design second. It helps identify areas to refine or improve designs. It also helps confider interactivity for a practical, functional end product.

Why is it important?

The implementing of UX into this life cycle is so important for many reasons. Focusing on real user problems, first of all, reduces the impact of designer bias. This helps create a better product for the consumers, the people who are experiencing the product first-hand, and providing your company’s sales. User-centered design puts the user front and center, and considering their story, emotions, and insights you’ve gathered about them. It essentially builds a better customer satisfaction-conversion-retention journey. It also helps to keep consumers loyal to the product and even the brand, and establishes a two-way relationship between the designer and the user. It has also been proven to improve return on investment (ROI).

UX design also focuses on accessibility in design, which is beneficial towards populations with any type of disability or incapacity. Assistive technology is something that is studied and designed a lot in UX, for example color modification for people with low vision, voice control for people with limited dexterity and screen readers for people with limited vision. 

Equity-focused design includes designing for groups that have been historically underrepresented or ignored when building products, including different races, abilities, economic statuses, languages, ages and genders. This includes working on better accessibility for these groups.

It also comprehends designing for multiple platforms including:

·      Designing elements and features to fit different screen sizes

·      Considering ways a user interacts with each platform and how this might affect design decisions.

·      Considering the way that information is organized on different screens (Content Layout)

·      Designs for each product will vary based on how and when you expect users to need the product (Functionality)

An example of poor UX contributing to a failure of a platform is when Signal was rumored to overthrow WhatsApp in direct messaging. During the 2020 lockdown, a group of friends decided to migrate to Signal communication against Facebook and WhatsApp’s company values. After downloading this new service, they realized that the multi-dimensional communication they could so easily access through WhatsApp was not satisfactory on this platform. Image and Video attachment, replying to messages and voice and video call were all a complete hassle. Within a week, every person was back on WhatsApp. It was clear to see that Facebook have worked extremely hard to put the user’s interaction and experience at the center of their design process, something Signal perhaps didn’t focus on as much.

 Job opportunities in UX

UX job openings are starting to become more common now, and there are many opportunities to start making lots of money through UX. A few opportunities at different types of companies are listed below:

·      Startups generally have a tight budget and few employees, meaning you will most likely have to focus on many aspects of UX (Generalist designer), including interaction design, visual design and motion design.

·      Freelancing- working for yourself and pitching and marketing your UX services to businesses to find customers.

·      Advertising agencies- These are teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaigns. Your role in these agencies are designing and wireframing for new product marketing campaigns.

·      Design agencies- A one-stop shop for the look of brands, products and services.

I highly recommend considering one of these positions, as the opportunities for an entry-level UX designer are countless, and the pay is potentially very high.

To summarize, UX design is a crucial process as it puts the user, your source of sales and income, first and top of mind while creating products, improving the inevitable success of that product. Also, UX positions are worth considering as there are so many opportunities  and fields for entry-level UX designers to explore.