Have you ever wondered why some apps are so good to quickly get users’ attention and hold it for a good amount of time while others still struggle to get enough visitors on their landing page?
Well, the answer often lies in the quality of the user experience design. Yes, one common reason for this difference is UX design that includes architecture, visuals, usability, market research, and content strategy.
Companies that don’t pay attention to product designing requirements are more likely to fail to provide meaningful and relevant experiences to their audience. Hence, understanding the significance of UX designing and the role of UX designers in the product development process becomes important for every business.
UX is all about the overall experience of a user using a product, system, or application, especially in terms of ease of use and efficiency. A great UX design could give your app a pleasant look and feel that is easy to use and, as a result, you could enhance your customer experience.
To do so, you need a good UX designer. Having a skilled UX designer you can just relax and let him do the needful to improve your product’s ease of use and create the best user experience since the UX designer role exists to serve such critical parts of the design process.
Here, we are throwing some light on How A UX Designer is Important In Every Step of Product Development?
User Research
The initial stage of the product development isn’t as simple as it looks, there are a lot of things at the beginning that could lead the project to success or even failure. One such crucial thing is user research, It does not just help to determine the exact needs, goals, and challenges in relation to the product but also scopes out the overall project.
The UX designer usually gets a brief about the UX designing requirements of the product and then the rest all things depend on, how well his user research is? In the UX design user research process, the designer is responsible for
- Gathering In-depth details
- Reviewing the current app or web
- Interacting with existing users
- Determining opportunities and pain points
- Analyzing market competition
User Persona
Once the UX designer identifies the right objectives and audience of the product with his research, the next thing is creating the user persona. Now, what is a user persona? It is a research-based initial assumption of the user characteristic about the software product with some needs, expectations, and key problems related to it.
Based on the user research, the UX designer creates a user persona that is focused on showing schemas about a specific group of users and emphasizing the potential challenges to define the likelihood of future outcomes.
Information Architecture
Now when the user persona is created, the designer needs to find out what content is needed and how it will appear across the website or app. This process of what texts should appear, and where refers to Information Architecture.
A good UX enables users to intuitively navigate the entire website or application and easily find what they are looking for. It is the core responsibility of a UX designer to make an application easy-to-navigate for all the users by creating flows for every persona so they can meet the users’ needs in the best possible way.
Wireframing
With different wireframing tools, a UX designer could make any website visually appealing and streamlined. Wireframing is an important part of the job of a UX designer and the UX process that acts as a map of the entire website or application. With the right wireframing process a UX designer presents a simple, clear, and basic visual product representation that solves the functional as well as navigation problems.
Prototyping
As soon as the UX designer maps out the product layout with wireframing, he steps forward to design prototypes. Developed by the UX designer during the designing process, Prototyping is a primitive representation of a product that aims to analyse the design solution flow and collect feedback on it before designing the final application.
Visual Design
Visual designing falls under the UI design process however, there are certain critical aspects besides colour schemes and typography that could be determined by a UX designer only.
Hence, In graphic designing process, the UX designer works in collaboration with the UI designer to create a visual representation of all the tested prototypes or mockups while taking care of the user research results, market analysis data, and the overall flow of every individual screen.
User Testing
User Testing is what comes next. It is performed at all the phases of designing to get more accurate and impactful results that deliver value with essential feedback from real users. Being the last chance to determine whether the product meets the actual business goals or not and to avoid any disparity in regards to the project and implementation, audit after implementation becomes important.
With User Testing, UX designers not just refine and validate design solutions with users on interactive mockups but also determine the design flaws before the final product gets developed.
Conclusion
UX designers are an integral part of the overall design process. No matter how good your application is, if users don’t find it easy to use, then the product will be a failure. While a UI designer works on the visual elements of the product, a UX designer takes care of the entire interaction between a user and an application including how a user interacts with the app and what experience he is getting while using it.
To some extent, it is not wrong to say that UX designers’ capabilities are beyond the UI designers’ limitations hence, having a UX designer is important in every step of product development.
