7 Key UX Learnings from 7 Years of Experience #ux #uxdesign

Constant learning approach. Be it a fresher or a well-experienced UX designer, you're not gonna learn everything or know everything about UX design. So what do you do? Make sure that you have a constant learning approach implemented throughout your career and you spend good amount of time learning new things. Because UX is not a theoretical-based subject, you have to do more to learn more. And the more you do, the more you learn, the more you earn. Your learning and your earning is going to be directly proportional to each other because of the amount of knowledge that you have will directly make you the amount of money that you want in your life and the way you use it. So make sure that learning has to be your constant approach throughout your journey. Also, UX design is a vast career umbrella. I have bifurcated and made a mind map for every single thing that you should know about UX, UI, and communication skills that is required for the same. And here's a mind map on the top, and you can also find the link for that Miro board in the bottom description. Don't overthink, just get started. If you have kickstarted your design career as a fresher, or for someone who is from not a design background, you'll always be uncomfortable to face that problem statement and actually kickstart with the solving of the same. So make sure that you have to get started anyway. And the moment you start doing something for that problem statement, the solution will slowly and steadily take its shape. So don't ever avoid the problem statement. Don't do procrastination. Don't find reason to avoid solutioning. Make sure that you start in the very first place. Also do remember that if you don't start the journey, you're not gonna reach anywhere. So kickstart your solution anyway. The best way to overcome imposter syndrome is to first accept the fact that you are a learner and you're not an expert, and there are something that you can make mistake with. There are so many things that you don't know, but you have willingness to learn. Always take the criticism in the most constructive and positive manner as you can. Never be demotivated with anything because you're in a learning phase and you're not a master. At the same time, if you want to face stakeholders, make sure that all the design solution that you do has enough data, has enough data or research to back it up. Don't be just like, because I wanted to do it or because I like it, I did it. No, man, just tell that, you know, I did competitive analysis, I did user research, I have so many data points that helped me derive this solution and helped me take this decision for the solution. The moment you have a lot of data backing you up for your decision, you'll never be underconfident. In this ever-evolving world where the technology is changing every single day, every single month, do not wait for that final perfect product that you would want to launch into the market. Design fast, develop fast, test fast. Make sure that you can use functionalities and methods such as A/B testing and usability testing. A/B testing is simply designing two solutions and making sure that you fiddle around or change some specific aspect of that solution and then test it with your end users and actually measure which of the solution is doing best in terms of conversion ratio, for as an example. Usability testing is all about validating the end solution with the target audience. Usability is a huge topic, but to help you understand Let me give an example. For example, let's just say you have decided to craft a shirt for me which I would love to wear and buy from you. You came to me, you asked me a lot of questions that would derive my likes, dislikes, my colors, my preferences, which will help you design an actual shirt for me. And now what did you do? You designed the solution, you created the shirt, and now you directly uploaded it to e-commerce website and gave me the link saying that, you know what, Anirudh, here's a shirt for you, why don't you go and buy? Now just try to understand that the success and the failure rate of the Solution is going to be 50/50 because you took all the essential information that is required to create that shirt, but you did not validate the same with me. You did not let me use it. You did not take feedback on the same or the final product. So there's high chances of failure also, right? I might not want it. But on the very same page, if you just came back to me that, you know what, this is the prototype of the shirt that I'm designing for you, can you please take and give your feedback so I can learn from it and I can implement? Same what goes with usability testing. You have a solution for your end user, so without talking to that end user, without taking feedback from that end user, don't ever put that solution live into the market as a website or a digital app. That is what usability testing is all about, actually identifying usability issues and other problems that the solution is facing which does not allow user to use it efficiently. As simple as that. Constant feedback mechanism. Make sure that you take insightful and actionable data from your end users or the customer, based on which you can reiterate and make that solution efficient if it is not at all. Make the most of the methods such as NPS score and customer satisfactory score. NPS score stands for Net Promoter Score, which means that you have to take some input from the user based on the product that they're using. So every single time your product is live into the market, make sure that you give contextual nudges to your customer for any specific reason. You might have actually experienced it while using an e-commerce product or a food delivery app. Every time your food is delivered to you, you would always get a nudge saying that, you know what, from a scale of 1 to 10, how would you like to rate your overall experience or the experience of the delivery or the experience of the food quality? That is what NPS is all about— Net Promoter Score. You ask, you take feedback from the users about the product. Second And third is customer satisfactory score, where you actually take the generic understanding and feedback from the user. What do they actually think about your product? So you can have multiple questionnaires given back to the users and take score on each and every question that you have, and then make sure that you take action and improve your product based on customer satisfactory score. Set the right KPI. KPIs are basically key performance indicators which actually help you measure the overall return on investment of your UX exercise that you're doing. Eventually in your company. Forget about the reach and impression, focus on the funnel drops. For example, login page to homepage, homepage to search, search to product description page, product description page to cart and payment, and so on and so forth. Make sure that you measure all the user behavior on such pages and actually calculate the funnel drops. You can always use analytical tools such as CleverTap, Inspectlet, User Experience, and also Google Analytics tools. Now let me actually explain you what is a funnel drop with an example. So here's an e-commerce website where I wanted to go and buy an iPhone charger very quickly. So I went to the website, I started searching for iPhone chargers, I found one, and I want to buy one right now. Now what happens is once I wanted to buy, it's asking me to actually log in or create a profile, and I don't have a profile right now. And that is the actual user behavior, right? Nobody wants to go to e-commerce website and randomly create your profile on that. Every time you want to buy a product, you make the decision to purchase a product. Only then you would go forward and provide your details such as login details, phone number, email ID, or OTP. So now that I wanted to buy this product, I went ahead and provided my details. So it asked me for email ID. It also asked me my phone number. But unfortunately, I got a very bad experience because this website wanted to actually verify my email ID as well as my phone number before I can actually get started and make the payment for the product. So what happened is it took a couple of minutes for the OTP to come to my email ID. I did the verification, then again it sent OTP to my phone number, which again took a couple of minutes, which has to be within a couple of seconds, right? And then it almost took me a couple of minutes to complete the entire journey. Now at this any given moment, their user can actually be dropped off from the website and go back to other website and actually make the payment and buy the product from other website. This is the actual best example of a funnel drop. You came from homepage to search page, search page to cart page, cart page to login page, and from login page you wanted to make a payment but you could not. So this is a funnel drop. You need to observe this with a lot of analytical tools, some of which I have already explained, and then fix that funnel drop. Maybe just doing a small competitive analysis will let you know that most of the other products are just taking one mobile phone OTP verification and allowing users to go forward to the payment page. Networking and collaboration. Now this is one of the skills that I've learned in the very hard manner in design domain and in design career. Networking and collaborating with like-minded people and other cross-domain people is very important. For example, something that took me 2 years to achieve in my life, if I had right people in my network and right collaboration skill, I would have got it within couple of months. And that is the best example of networking and its power. Eventually you can get started by networking doing on LinkedIn, Discord, Slack, and other communities where you can you can join with like-minded and cross-collaborative people and start talking to them and make sure that you collaborate very nicely. So select the medium, whatever works for you, for example Slack, LinkedIn, or Discord, and get started with the networking today itself right after you watch this video. That's all about the most important 7 learnings that I wanted to share from my career. There are millions of other things that I can share with you, but to be very honest, you don't have to stress on a lot of other things because the moment you gradually grow from one point to another, your things and your learning will fall in its own place and you'll get figure out every other thing. So do not stress on yourself, just have a constant learning process, network with a lot of people. That's all for the day. I'm gonna see you in the next video.