From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

Understanding user experience (UX) and website planning

From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

Understanding user experience (UX) and website planning

- User experience, or UX, refers to the experience someone has when interacting with a product or service. From finding a service in Google, to understanding a product offering, to purchasing the product and sharing a review, UX is about managing website visitors perceptions of ease of use and getting things done quickly. Everyone has had the experience of being completely lost about what to do next on a website. If you can't find the link, can't understand the product offering, or misunderstand what you're being asked to do, that's a UX fail in process. UX practitioners are all about identifying and eliminating those moments in existing products and preventing those moments in new products. The UX field is broad, and the definition of UX seems to be changing frequently. However, by most definitions, a UX professional may be a generalist or a specialist in one area of UX. Generalists often work with small businesses, start-ups, and nonprofits through the entire UX process. They identify organizational, user, and website goals. They define and refine the target audience, the group of individuals who need this product or service. They study how problems are solved now, how they could be solved in the future, and how we could simplify the process of solving those problems. They may create prototypes and test them with members of their target audience to help create specifications and pass to an engineering team to implement. UX Specialists focus on one area of UX in a deep way. For example, an information architect often focuses on organization of information. This person may have a background in database design or in library science. They're interested in classification, identifying and refining terms, and organizing the site or applications so that the information is easy to find. Other specialists focus deeply on user research, user testing, branding, content design, and many other areas. If you're a curious person who enjoys research and learning about new fields, or if you're interested in changing the world through better technology, but ya don't want to write the code for it, UX may be for you. Some professionals have a background in psychology or they're just interested in how people think. UX professionals are open minded, ready to receive feedback from users and managers. They also have some strong opinions about what makes users happy and what makes a great interface, but they're also ready to let those opinions go if testing shows they're wrong. UX professionals rarely write code themselves, however, they should understand the coding process so that they're better able to communicate with their team and understand what makes a codable interface. UX professionals use prototyping software to test their interfaces. The most popular product for this is Figma, but Sketch, Adobe XD, Envision, or Balsamiq are other common choices among many others. And, finally, UX professionals rely heavily on sticky notes for creating workflows and organizing information. By the very nature of this work, UX professionals talk to people a lot. They talk with management, with people on the development team, and with people in their target audience. They are good at putting people at ease, and they're naturally curious about everyone and how they think. While UX professionals spend the occasional day in front of their computer without talking to anyone, those days aren't too common. Expect lots of meetings and discussions to be a regular part of your work day in this field.

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