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| Demystifying UX Design: A Day in the Life of a UX Designer |
What Exactly Do UX Designers Do All Day?
Have you ever used a website or app that made you want to pull your hair out because it was so confusing and disorganized? Or perhaps you've used a digital product that felt intuitive, enjoyable, and easy to navigate. These extremely different user experiences showcase the critical importance of user experience (UX) design.
UX design focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations to create digital experiences that are useful, usable, enjoyable, accessible, and meaningful. Without thoughtful UX design, products feel confusing, illogical, overwhelming, unusable, and disconnected from user goals.
But what exactly do UX designers do on a daily basis to help companies avoid these pitfalls? Let's peek into the life of Tish Gance, an expert UX designer with over 25 years of experience.
"I’ve been a UX designer for about three years; before that, I spent 22 years in print graphic design. As I saw the print industry changing dramatically and rapidly, I needed to find a new career, and a friend suggested a career in UX design. It was love at first sight — I found I’d already been applying a lot of the core UX design methodologies, so the switch was seamless."
Tish explains that UX designers "fix things." They pinpoint problems in digital experiences, dig into user research to understand root causes, ideate solutions, and facilitate building redesigned products that remedy pain points.
UX professionals work in a wide variety of settings - as freelancers, at digital agencies, in-house at companies, at tech firms, and more. Tish runs her own UX consultancy where she helps companies assess and enhance their digital products' usability and user experience.
So what does her average workday look like? Here's a peek behind the curtain:
"Typical client days include reviewing progress on their journeymap. And I often end my day with user experience design “homework”—reading UX design-related books and articles. Of course there are often variations to this schedule, and there are days where I spend more time doing UX-related office work—like running website or app overviews, conducting heuristic evaluations, or looking at heat maps to see if my clients’ goals are being met."
Now that you have a high-level view of UX design from a practitioner's lens, let's dig deeper into the most frequently asked questions about this exciting field:
Frequently Asked UX Design Questions
What Exactly is UX Design?
UX design focuses on the entire process of acquiring and integrating a digital product, including:
- How easy, satisfying and enjoyable it is to navigate
- How well the interface visually communicates
- The user's perceptions, feelings and interactions
The overall goal is crafting an experience aligned with target users' motivations and goals.
For example, an e-commerce company would focus its UX design on making shopping, checking out, billing and returns intuitive and streamlined. The layout, interactions, and content help convert visitors into paying customers.
On the other hand, a news website would concentrate its UX on easy content discovery, search and sharing to acquire and retain engaged readers.
In both cases, UX design directly connects to core business goals and KPIs.
What Specific Tasks Do UX Designers Handle?
UX designers tackle a wide variety of responsibilities:
- User research: Understanding target users through methods like interviews, surveys, analytics and usability testing
- Information architecture: Structuring, organizing and labeling content and functions
- Interaction design: Crafting intuitive, logical flows from screen to screen
- Visual design: Applying UI design principles to communicate key site elements
- Prototyping: Transforming ideas and concepts into basic site maps and wireframes
- Testing: Validating prototypes and live sites against target metrics and KPIs
Experienced UX designers must master skills spanning research, analytics, design thinking, writing, and psychology. The goal is applying this diverse expertise to create experiences that align with users' expectations, perspectives, and goals.
Why is UX Design So Critical?
Have you ever felt frustrated trying to find a specific piece of information or complete a task on a website? Without UX design, digital products often feel confusing, overwhelming and unusable.
For example, think about when you order food delivery. A restaurant's website or app allows you to quickly find menu options, customize your order, pay seamlessly, and track delivery status. This is only possible through meticulous UX design considering factors like:
- Logical, appealing visual presentation
- Clear calls-to-action driving conversions
- Intuitive flows across pages/screens
- Seamless integrations with delivery and payment systems
UX design directly impacts how easily and enjoyable a product is to use. Good UX = happy, loyal users. Bad UX = frustrated users who switch to competitors at the first opportunity.
How Does UX Design Differ from UI Design?
These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they refer to related yet distinct specialties:
- User interface (UI) design focuses specifically on the visual elements allowing users to interact with a product. This includes page layouts, buttons, menus, micro-interactions, colors, and more.
- User experience (UX) design deals with the entire spectrum of factors impacting how users acquire and engage with a product. UI design is one subset of the broader UX design process.
For example, a UI designer would focus specifically on crafting clean, appealing visual interfaces that invite clicks and guide visitors from screen to screen.
Meanwhile, a UX designer would analyze behavioral data to understand target users' goals, pinpoint usability issues on site flows, conceptualize new layouts and interactions to optimize conversions, and test prototypes with real users.
The roles are highly complementary and require extensive collaboration to build great products.
Breaking Down the UX Design Process
Now that you understand the immense value UX brings to the table, how exactly does the UX process unfold? Let's break it down step-by-step:
Step 1: Conduct User Research
No UX project kicks off without deep user research. UX designers use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand target users, including:
Analytics Review
By combing through site analytics, UX designers identify high-level trends related to engagement, conversions, popular content, pain points, and more.
Interviews & Surveys
One-on-one user interviews and broad surveys collect qualitative data on motivations, thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Site Testing
Usability testing gathers observations as real users interact with a site or prototype to catch pitfalls.
Competitive Research
Analyzing top competitors' designs sparks strategies for differentiation.
The goal is developing empathy and perspective regarding how products fit into users' lifestyle needs and goals.
Step 2: Map Content & Functions
Next UX designers architect the information framework and content mapping for pages and features. This includes:
- Card sorting: Users organize topics and labels to determine ideal groupings
- Site mapping: Visual diagrams reflect desired content and hierarchy
- User flows: Models map the linear journey users take across screens and functions
Like architecting a house, UX designers first blueprint the structure before visual aesthetics. IA directly informs testing and refinement later on.
Step 3: Wireframe Layouts
With research insights and structural mapping complete, UX designers transition into wireframing key pages and flows.
Wireframes are simple page layout sketches depicting:
- Basic interface elements like menus, buttons and icons
- High-level grouping and hierarchy of functions and content
- Relative positioning of features on screen
By focusing purely on utility at this stage, UX designers determine the best information architecture before concentrating on visual design details.
Step 4: Build & Test Prototypes
Wireframes transform into interactive prototypes using tools like Figma and InVision.
Prototypes enable:
- Simulation of real site functionality: Clickable links, input fields, transitions, etc.
- Testing with real users: Observing interactions to catch confusing areas
- Quick iteration: Rapid rebuilding based on feedback
Instead of live sites, prototypes act as sandboxes for testing theories and interactions at a fraction of the time and cost.
Step 5: Launch, Monitor & Optimize
Unlike construction projects which wrap up once a house is built, UX designers continue optimizing digital products post-launch.
Post-launch practices include:
- Performance tracking: Monitoring analytics to catch new issues
- Surveys & interviews: Continually sampling user feedback
- A/B testing: Trying variations to improve conversions
- Ongoing testing: Addressing emerging pain points from new features and audience segments
Top Skills and Qualities for UX Designers
We've just only scratched the surface of UX design complexity. Naturally, it requires an expansive skillset spanning technical an soft skills:
Technical Skills
- User research
- Information architecture
- Interaction design
- UI design foundations
- Prototyping software (Figma, etc.)
- Analytics platforms
Soft Skills
- Creativity and design thinking
- Communication and collaboration
- Empathy
- Storytelling
- Problem solving
For visual thinkers who enjoy understanding humans and designing solutions tailored for them, UX design offers an extremely rewarding career path filled with constant creativity.
Demand for UX Design Continues Exploding
The UX field has experienced rapid growth over the past decade as companies pour more investment into digital experiences. UX design roles consistently rank among the best jobs based on satisfaction, work-life balance, compensation and demand.
The average UX designer salary exceeds $90k/year - much higher than national median income. Beyond competitive pay, professionals also enjoy schedule flexibility, remote opportunities, and constant innovation.
With demand for skilled UX designers accelerating faster than supply, those looking to pivot into tech without advanced coding abilities will discover outstanding prospects in UX design. And opportunities span far beyond typical tech hubs with remote work continuing to gain popularity.
For visual, creative thinkers seeking careers allowing positive impact through user-centric design, UX is the ideal avenue bringing together humans and technology.
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