Principles of UX Design — Chapter 2 of 9
Chapter 2
Applying UX as your practice and the roles that involved in it.
Roles that involved in UX practice:
- User experience designer
- Visual designer
- User experience architect
- Information architect
- User experience strategist
- Interaction designer
Are you confused about which role does what in UX ?
UX is the practice: strategy, user research, information architecture, and visual design make up each category.
This will helps with assessing UX maturity. When your organisation got low rating in market, it’s likely that not all steps are engaged in a project. It’s typical that flow and wireframes are some of the first UX steps that implement.
Perhaps the biggest myth that exists with various UX roles within the practice is that a company can hire a single “UX person” to work through all of these functions.
UX strategy
UX strategists are a natural complement to product strategists, marketing planners, brand strategists, and other more “typical” functions that define roadmaps and approaches to business and product definition.
UX strategists must engage and deliver the project moves through research and into information architecture, visual design, development, and launch. Deploying the UX strategy to drive these early conversations and decisions will ensure that roadmaps, business and behaviour goals, performance indicators, desired outcomes, and potential roadblocks are appropriately outlined and followed through the entirety of the project.
Pushback to this role is common, and it’s among the most difficult to implement into an organisation. This is because it’s the most similar role to other strategic roles, and resources may feel as though their responsibilities are being usurped by adding a UX strategist. Be sure to outline that this strategy is a complement to other strategy resources.
UX activities are
- Requirements
- Scoping
- Personas
- Experience brief
- UX requirements
- Behaviour goals
- Journey maps
- UX backlog
User research
how can you create user-centered products without hearing from the user?
Without research, UX isn’t UX.
If your company is delivering products without listening to users voices, they’re doing a great disservice to both the company and the users.
The main responsibility of a researcher is to engage with potential and actual users of a product in order to understand how they interact with the experience, and whether it works well or has opportunities to improve.
Information is gathered in support of assumptions or used to alter the experience towards what users are requesting. There are a number of research methodologies that can be use depending on the type of feedback needed.
There are 2 ways to engage user research:
- At the outset of the project to drive product strategy
- After the product launches
It’s ideal to drive product strategy based on research before work starts.
Gathering feedback after a product launches is also beneficial, but in order to make changes, previously made decisions on business, UX, and engineering have to be reverted and relaunched.
The reality is that user research can be completely scaled to match the budget and timing at end.
UX activities are
- Requirements
- Test plans
- Personas
- User research
- Heuristic analysis
- Contextual inquiry
- Expert analysis
- Time studies
Information architect
Information architects (IA) involved with designer, developer, strategist.
Dig around in a workspace of an IA, and you’ll likely find pens and markers organised by color and various types of Post-it notes stacked just so. It’s fitting, as practitioners in this discipline use organisational tools such as site maps, user flows, and task flows and logical process thinking to organise experiences.
The role of the IA spans many disciplines and requires broad experience. As an IA works through business goals and requirements to define the structure of an experience, they have to understand design and hierarchy principles to appropriately structure the page. They also need to understand code on how APIs and front-end technologies impact the experience. And they have to understand content to convey the intention of headlines, buttons, and other content areas.
IA is generally easier to implement than other disciplines because they can be derived as the most beneficial. It’s not uncommon for more traditionally focused design companies to be apprehensive towards design.
UX activities are
- Requirements
- Site maps
- User flows
- Task models
- Sketching
- Wireframes
- Prototypes
- Interaction specs
UX visual designer
This should be pretty self explanatory, right? Designers, well, design. They make things pretty and paint the walls, if you will. This is a common generalisation for an essential part of the process.
Design is more than picking a font and imagery
Applying solid design principles to an experience can be directly connected to the success or failure of it. The basics of design include balance, harmony, hierarchy, and color theory. A designer’s tools include font families (weights and sizes), color, illustration, and imagery.
Every color, line, button, and font of a well-designed application has reasoning, rationale, and hours of iteration behind it. All to make sure you don’t realise those decisions or why they were made.
Branding, logo creation, and art direction are additional design functions that come together to create a strong experience.
Strong UX visual designers can, however, be responsible for interpreting brand direction as they design the application you’re launching.
UX activities are
- Requirements
- Visual design
- Style guides
- Design pattern libraries
- Component kits
i’ll see you in next chapter — we’ll talk about project planning and process.
