User experience

Summary: "User experience" covers all aspects of an end user's interaction with a company, its services and its products.

The first requirement for an ideal user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without any hassle. Then comes the simplicity and elegance that creates products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. A true user experience is more than telling customers what they say, or providing checklist features. Achieving a high-quality user experience across a company's offerings requires seamless integration of services from multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

It's important to separate the overall user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is clearly a very important part of the design. For example, consider a website with movie reviews

Websites and web applications have become progressively more complex as our industry's technologies and processes have advanced. What used to be a one-way static medium has transformed into a very rich and interactive experience.

But regardless of how much the production process has changed, the success of a website still depends on only one thing: how users perceive it. "Does this website give me value? Is it easy to use? Is it enjoyable to use?" These are the questions that go through the minds of visitors when they interact with our products, and they form the basis of their decisions whether to become regular customers.

User experience design is about trying to answer “yes” to all of these questions. The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the professional discipline of UX design in the context of web-based systems such as websites and applications.

UX designers

UX designers also look at the subsystems and processes within the system. For example, they can study the checkout process of an e-commerce website to see if customers find the process of purchasing products from the website easy and pleasant. They can go deeper by studying subsystem components, such as seeing how efficient and pleasant the experience is for users filling out input fields in a web form.

Compared to many other disciplines, especially web-based systems, UX is relatively new.

Why is UX important? 

Nowadays, with so much emphasis on user-centered design, it seems almost unnecessary to explain and justify the importance of designing and enhancing the user experience. We could just say, "This is important because it addresses our customers' needs - enough said," and everyone would probably be satisfied with that.

However, those of us who worked in the web design industry prior to user-centered design, usability, and web accessibility coding will know that we built websites differently. Before our clients (and we) understood the value of user-centered design, we made design decisions based on just two things: what we thought was awesome and what the client wanted to see.

We negotiated based on what we thought worked—we designed for ourselves. The focus was on aesthetics and the brand, with little thought given to how the people who would use the website would feel about it.

There was no science behind what we did. We did it because the results looked good, because they were creative (so we thought) and because that's what our clients wanted.

But this decade has seen the Web Technology transform. Not only has it become more common—the Web had at least 1.5 billion users worldwide in 2008—but Web sites have become so complex and feature-rich that, to be effective, they have to change the user experience. Must have excellent design.

Furthermore, users are accessing websites in many ways: mobile devices, a wide range of browsers, different types of Internet connections.

We also recognize the importance of accessibility—that is, universal access to our web-based products not only for those with special needs, such as screen readers and non-traditional input devices, but also for those with Even for those who don't. have broadband connections or have old mobile devices etc.

What situations would benefit from UX design? 

It goes without saying that all web systems would benefit from solid user experience evaluation and design. It's hard to argue against that if you don't care about user-centered design at all. But we don't live in a perfect world, and we don't have unlimited resources. As such, we should prioritize and identify areas that stand to benefit the most from UX design and UX designers.