Introduction to UI / UX

Many people have heard the term “user experience” but not everyone knows what
this means. 

User experience (UX) is rapidly growing and revolutionizing how people interact
with the world around them. UX has found its importance in every Industry today

Every organization strives to build long lasting and mutually beneficial relationship
with their customers and UX designs help them in doing so.

Usually people refer to UI/UX as one term but actually these are 2 separate terms
with specific meaning and application

UI – Stands for User Interface Design

This revolves around how do you make interfaces, may it be phones, tablets, laptops
or large screens of various devices, to be easy and effective to use.

Where as, UX – Stand for User Experience Design

If you have ever purchased a product or benefitted from a service, you are
a user of that product or service irrespective of duration for which you have
experienced it

When you interact with a product, service, or company, you are having
an experience.

Sometimes its good, sometime mundane, sometime annoying and some times
exciting and engaging.

Like roller coaster of theme park .. Can you believe, you actually pay to get scared
and thrilled.

Irrespective of in which business the company is, Ultimately, most companies want
you to have a good experience using their product or services. In order to
understand what makes an experience good, we need to define what that means
from the perspective of the user
UX fundamentally is a process of designing experiences that relevant,
appealing, easy to use and enjoyable for the users, one of way to manifest
these experiences on digital platform is done through UI design.

Lets talk a bit more about UX as it is the overarching umbrella term the
encompasses different aspects of Design

The main factors that contribute to creating these appealing experiences are

First – Understanding you user for whom your solution is intended for

Second – Creating solutions that meets the user needs

Third – Making these solutions easy to learn and easy to use

Fourth – And the most important is, at any given point the user should feel that they
are in complete control of executing this solution whenever they need with ease.

Fifth – Cherry on the cake would be that the solutions that a UX designer creates
should have a ‘Wow’ factor, it should surprise and delight the user through their
journey

Lets spend some time to understand the above points in detail.

Lets understand this with an example

Taking an example of an online medicine delivery service.

As the foundation of this project, It is very important for the design team to
understand who are the users of their product or service are and what are the
factors that bring them to select your solution.

Then the team needs to keep in mind that the users are able to achieve their
intended outcome in our case: to get authentic / trusted and right medicines
delivered to them in a certain time frame.

This factor hence becomes the top most priority for the to team to work and ensure
the users are able to get the right medicines on time.
The next factor is that the service you create is easy to learn and use. In our
examples of medicine delivery service. Understand the user and their characteristic
and behavioral pattern, the solution should be easy to learn for new users who would
have never bought medicines online. The service should follow the users mental
models to make it intuitive.

More about mental models later.

Then come easy to understand is, the service clear in terms of the steps required
by the user like uploading the prescription or selecting the medicines.

Easily being able to add the quantity, input address and time of delivery and
select the payment option before confirming or consult a doctor of nurse if required
and many other service that you can add to this.

So it is very important for the service that you design to be easy to understand

The next factor is to offer control and freedom to the user, In case of online
medicine service, the users may change their mind or decide to change the quantity
or the brand of the medicine selected, they may remember to add something after
they have placed the order or even they may cancel the order or reschedule during
the process for some personal reason.

The factor of adding a quotient of delight or surprise for the user could mean,
offering a discount coupon on next purchase or waiving off the delivery charges for
an order which make the user/customer feel special and would want them to return
to the service.

The core of UX design is that, its all about the users and their experiences

Products or services that do not have good UX design are not taking users needs
into account.

Taking into consideration user needs, expectation, pain points and motivation into
account leads to designing of products and service that have a great value and are
exciting for the users to use.

Businesses all over the world have started realizing the value of good UX
design, which not only helps raise the brand value and have customers returning or
recommending their service to other but also it offers a distinctive competitive
advantage in today’s cut-throat competition edge

Every stage of how and when you use specific product or service has an
emotion attached to these stages. A UX designer, with thorough
understanding of the user is able to map these emotions and work towards
build more positive and delightful one though each stage