UX Designer - Why its vital to underatand being a UI Designer- Misconceptions - Ep 255

Many people think UI is all about designing. That's the whole thing of it. And they see the fancy screens and Figma and Adobe XT and then they decide this is all about the world of problem solving and product design. No, there is something called ux. Once people started learning about ux, they started really liking it. They started to see the value, what it offers and now they're actually trying to close the whole loop of feedback. What is the user required and how are we solving that problem using our ui? And how you become a UI UX designer on. A whole lot of people get this clarity after going into this field. A lot of people don't understand even though they are in the field. But this podcast is going to help you understand why UX is very, very important. And particularly how you integrate the loop and close the feedback so that you have a complete understanding of a holistic product development. Okay, let's jump in. Welcome guys. Welcome to this podcast. Thank you for staying tuning in with me in Design for Change. Thank you for the overwhelming support and as well, we are close to touching 40 countries and please spread your word with other friends who might be also interested to learn something like this every single day. Okay? And also particularly we actually make clear understanding in this podcast. Like we have to know what is ux and I'm going to explain you UX in a very, very short span of like let's say in this podcast, less than 10 minutes so that you can get to know what is user experience, why it is very vital to provide that relevant experience for the people and what are the misconceptions what people have? Let's break down. Okay, so user experience is actually a process of creating the meaningful experiences for the user. Okay? Majorly, usability, functionality and the relevancy of the business goal is actually a particular definition to understand UXs. Okay? Every interaction where the user has is leading to the experience, what it's created at the other end, whether it is a smooth experience, whether it's a graph, whether the graphics is stuck, whether if it's an interrupted interaction. People get to experience at every point of time. When they touch base with your application or a mobile or even a physical product, it's applicable for physical product as well. You need to get this. Okay, Jagdish, so what are the key components of this? The first is research and methodology. People as a UX designer, first you go and understand the user needs behaviors. It's very, very important for a designer to get this. You can do it through interviews or surveys or testing methods or maybe field visit or online surveys, anything. Guys, you can use something like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Microsoft Team forms, type forms in order to get this companies that conduct research, you know what, starting with the design process are 30 times 30 percentage more likely to improve the user satisfaction. This is a statistics by Decisil. We need to get this also. Second part of this particular UX is creating user Persona. First of all you understand the user, then you create a user Persona. So Personas are actually avatar, kind of a fictional characters. Guys, this is to represent different users. See, first you can gather data, identify certain patterns and behaviors and motivations and anger and characteristics. And then you can create the demography, you can write down their particular character. How you create avatar for a game, right? So same like that, you can able to do it. Okay, So a Persona might be Sara, could be some 30 years old and it could be your typical what you call idle target market. So that is the best way to do. The third important thing is mapping out your entire user's cognitive understanding through particular walkthrough or based on scenarios. Okay, walkthroughs and scenarios is more and more important because a lot of people don't do this. They say that okay, let me make user flow, let me make this that. But cognitive walkthrough for a user is very important to understand their flow. So mapping each and every step and visualizing them using some illustrations will give you clarity what people are going through the pain. Maybe sometimes people will not tell you this is their pain, but until unless you go and find out and stand in their shoes, you will understand that's a pain. Maybe a traffic person who is standing for a full day. If you go and ask him what is the problem you are facing while you are doing traffic, he will say no, I don't have any problem until unless you stand there for a day. And then they see what the problem he's encountering. How much his legs are painting, how much his hands are painting, how much he's doing his physical drain of energy. You can design a product for him or a service for him which can able to help him the moment if you show it, he'll be happy. Yeah, this is what I want. But initially people will not tell. That's why cognitive walkthrough is very important for a designer to understand. Whatever I just told you is very, very important. Guys, there are many techniques to do it. You can use storyboard, you can use journey map, you can use many methods to do it, but you could do it In Miro. First to map it out, you could use lucidchart, you could use Whimsical. You can use invision figjam. First map it down. Companies that users, company that uses this cognitive method to. Cognitive method to understand their users, they reduce the development time by up to 20% because they get to see the clarity. Okay, so the third important thing is Persona. The fourth important thing is usability. Sorry, Wireframing and prototype. When you have this clarity, then you can start building some solution. First make with low fidelity and then move for high fidelity. You can use Sketch, Figma, Adobe XT or InVision to do that. Even in Miro also you could do that. Okay, the next step is crucial, which is called testing. So testing with the real users, how do you do it? You can do it in a very casual way, which is called a, which is called unmoderated testing way. But you can do it in a proper moderated way with giving a proper instruction, having a facilitator, having a set of boundaries so that the people will be able to get a clear boundary to work on your product and service and give you feedback. There is something called very quick testing called a gorilla based method. You could go very quick to any place and collect the data and come back. In my program I use students to do a one day project research, go to the field and take data. This is exactly called gorilla testing method. Okay, because it's very important. A study by Nielsen Mormon Group found that usability testing can uncover 85 percentage of the usability issues which is majorly involvement in development of the product and reduce the errors over the time. So get this clarity. So let me repeat the steps, whatever we have discussed so far. The first is I help you understand user research methods and tools. Second is creating Persona. Third is mapping the cognitive walkthrough on scenarios. Fourth is wireframing and prototyping. Fifth is usability testing. Sixth is creating information architecture. You need to organize and structure the content, what kind of information you want, what kind of the information you need, primary, secondary and tertiary. Are you designing a website or a mobile app or anything? It needs to be structured. You can use card sorting to do it. You can use mind mapping to do it. You can use tools like Azure and mindmeister to help you build this kind of a sitemaps to get you clarity. In fact, the latest version of the ChatGPT 4.0 does the information architecture of any competitor. You can use that as a benchmark to create that thing. Okay, free ChatGPT doesn't offer that you can able to use 4o the moment when you put the website hyperlink, it will exactly give you the information architecture of that particular website. Yeah, it's magical. Try to do that. Okay, the next is interaction design. Having all done this, then and only now you're engaging with the interface design. See, six steps is there before you start with interface. That's why I'm telling you UX is very important. Okay, so interaction design majorly focused on creating the user interface. Micro interaction, animation, graphics, feedback, these are all the things guys. So a UX designer commonly what they solve is they improve the navigation and optimize the user flow. They make sure the accessibility and usability is happening according to the WCAG guidelines. And also let me tell you guys, they use tools like Wave Axe in order to check the accessibility before they launch it for the developers. According to a Web AM survey, 98.1% of the home pages are detectable by WCAG2 failures. Lot of websites has this failure mind inventory statistics shows that and they will help you optimize the loading time. Because user experience designers, when they are not able to optimize the workflow, it will lead to larger loading times. That's why it is very important to optimize that what happens slow loading times can create a huge frustration in the users. And optimizing those will improve the performance as well. A 1 second delay in the page response can lead to 7% decrease in conversions. Guys, businesses are ultimately selling their products and services, right? If there is a loss in conversion, that will lead to a great impact for them. Okay, and then you simplify the interface. This is the next step. Once you simplify it using the vision, visual hierarchy and clarity, then the user interface makes so much of improvement. Okay, so the UX designer improves the navigation, he improves the accessibility, he reduces the optimal loading time, he simplifies the user interface and then only the final interface looks. There are a lot of statistics and methods to really help you understand. Guys, I already told you in between this particular thing also. But you need to get one clarity. Unless until you are very clear what problem you're solving. Unless you're very clear what is your user needs are, you can't really play any role that's directly very clear. That is why it's understand it is. It is very vital to understand the other part of the design which is called the user experience, design and research part to get to the clarity what is your user real needs are. And then you design a product and then you design an interface that creates a holistic you. The more value add the more salary you get. The more salary you get the better you will be able to live your lifestyle and also fulfill your dreams. So create value proposition in your work. Don't just be a one sided designer, I'll do only ui. Don't just be one sided designer, I'll do only ux. It should be the fair balance of both and then you will be able to see huge amount of difference because tomorrow you will be becoming a product manager. Tomorrow you will be managing a product team. Tomorrow you will be working with developers, designers, graphic roles, everybody marketing, sales. So you will see the end to end part of this product in order to create a lasting impact. Okay, I hope this podcast would have given you clarity and many misconceptions. What developer what a designer and UX and UI designer meant for okay, thank you for staying tuning here. If you really like this podcast give me a best start rating in Apple and Spotify and subscribe me to get further notified in the exercises. Okay bye bye.