UX - in other words, User Experience - is the definition of creating designs that carry people through an experience. This goes for any product, whether it’s an app, website, animation, or any digital design-based scheme.
UX design is today’s tech-obsessed world of utilizing psychology and social psychology to attract users, or customers. They use multiple touchpoints, or points of interaction like social media, phone, email, and instant messaging for the customers to engage with within the experience (Babin and Harris, 2018). For a digital designer, this is a dream to create a new moving, living world.
In the last blog, I talked about picking up and becoming obsessed with graphic design and Adobe at 12 years old. My main forays were into more static designs like Photoshop (an encompassing design-making product that runs by largely undifferentiated marketing, relative to the other design products in the market, where both professional, amateur, and occasional designers can make their home), InDesign (a slightly more niche (Babin and Harris, 2018) offering for publication and longer-form book making), and animation programs like Flash and Fireworks. When I entered college, I continued to develop my skills in these programs - but a new interest developed as well in the idea of website making.
Now, I come from a family of engineers. Prior to college, my parents tried to teach me coding but on my own stubborn basis, I refused to simply because I was contrary and wanted to do exactly what I was told not to do. While I may not be a first-generation student in college, I’m the first kid in my family to not go directly into something purely analytical. Instead, by going into business, I wanted a more cohesive combination. The creative passions I held made me somewhat of a black sheep, but I wanted to see that manifest in some major form of my time in undergrad. UX was one of the areas where I first found that I could have that interesting combination of business marketing, design, and technology/engineering in one single position - and still, like I stated before, create a story like I so loved to do.
User experience (UX) design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. From acquiring and integrating the product, including the aspects of branding, design, usability, and function, UX designers have to ride through how they want customers to navigate their product ("What is User Experience (UX) Design?").
Different processes describing the UX designer mindset ("What is User Experience (UX) Design?")
Take for instance some of the websites you encounter on a daily basis. What is the first thing on the homepage that catches your eye? What is the first thing you click? Do the buttons look like actual buttons? Are you able to find the navigation menus easily? What if you can’t find the navigation - is that deliberate? All these are questions that I, as well as an UX designer has to think about. The same kinds of questions go for UX designers for mobile application as well. If it’s an app, a UX designer has to think about whether it’s going to be a native, hybrid, or web app. A native app exists solely on the kind of mobile operating system it’s designed for (Android, iOS, etc). A web app is one whose design must be adaptable depending on whether you’re accessing it on your phone or laptop. A hybrid contains aspects of both (Team, 2019). After deciding what kind of app it is, the designer has to consider whether the buttons are easily reachable by the user’s thumbs, whether it’s easily scrollable, the app looks on different phone designs, and many other questions in the design process.
Below are some examples of the websites I’ve created. Even this site that you’re sitting and reading my blog on now, is a product of my understanding of UX and website design. First I work with UI, in other words User Interface Design, the more front-end site of building a creative and engaging UI across potentially different form factors (Duckmanton & Duckmanton, 2019). This means I’m placing boxes and animations where I see most fit to catch the users’ eye. That animation of code you saw on my front page? It’s deliberately set to have movement as you’re scrolling through. My publications and artworks are part of my portfolio itself, and having that square-like clean theme shows off my skills from the second you step in. Second, I work with the front end development, where I’m coding HTML to add special features in ("Should designers learn front-end development? 11 UX-perts weigh in"). In these pictures, you can see both the simple view and Developer Coder view of the Wix site editor.
Various pages of my recent website projects, utilizing both UI design and front-end development coding
More and more, the importance of designers, especially digital designers, learning front end development and other kinds of coding is becoming apparent. Many of these digital marketing companies incorporate big data into their softwares now - in the analytics and analysis aspects. Since, of course, they’re part of the bigger umbrella of the tech industry, they’ve ridden the wave of big data analytics to serve their products further (Babin and Harris, 2018). Adobe in particular, uses predictive analytics, especially in their Experience Cloud software with Adobe Target ("Adobe Experience Cloud") - combining UX design and analytics for SMBs to see how people are navigating their websites, and how to optimize that experience (Cook, 2018).
The reality is that creativity comes now hand in hand with analytics. Again, with the onset of technology shifting how we create experiences, this is the kind of business that at the end of the day, I’m most passionate about.
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Sources of Value Add: Design process schemes for UX designers and graphic designers, prototype views of personal website works, and Adobe Experience Cloud software product offerings
Works Cited
Adobe Experience Cloud. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud.html
Babin, B. J., & Harris, E. G. (2018). Consumer Behavior (8th ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.
Cook, D. (2018, December). Design, Editing & Rendering Software Publishing in the US. IBISWorld Industry Report 51121D. Retrieved from IBISWorld database.
Duckmanton, D., & Duckmanton, D. (2019, February 21). Why UX and UI should remain separate. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://uxdesign.cc/why-ux-and-ui-should-remain-separate-7d6e3addb46f
Should designers learn front-end development? 11 UX-perts weigh in. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.justinmind.com/blog/should-designers-learn-front-end-development-10-ux-perts-weigh-in/
Siang, T. (n.d.). How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design. Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/how-to-change-your-career-from-graphic-design-to-ux-design
Team, T. (2019, February 25). What are the popular types and categories of apps. Retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/popular-types-of-apps/
What is User Experience (UX) Design? (n.d.). Retrieved April 7, 2019, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/ux-design