Hey there beautiful and or handsome reader! If you clicked on this article, permit me to assume that you are either an aspiring designer, someone with an interest in design, a person in tech with some connection to design, a person who just loves to read or someone who is curious about everything and anything.

Whoever you are, welcome to my first design article! Am I a designer? yes. Am I a professional designer? I do not know about this one(hehe) but I do know that I love to design and build meaningful and sometimes non-meaningful things.

I got to know about design about 2 years ago. Initially, I had believed anything relating to design only included fashion or arts and graphics. Imagine how surprised I was to discover design was a major part of technology! It was like getting smacked on the head with a baseball bat - do not try this at home, my brain was suddenly alive.

My thirst for knowledge got me deeper and deeper into design until I stumbled upon UX design. This is the main character of this story, so let's focus for a bit. In this article, I will take you through a surface-level dive into the following;

1. What is UX Design?

2. Who can be a UX Designer?

3. Why do we need UX Design?

4. The UX Design Process.

5. Benefits and Limitations of UX Design.

6. How UX Design is Doing Heroic Work.

You may think I will use professional terms to write definitions and I will on some occasions, but everything I write here is of my understanding and belief, except quoted otherwise.

What is UX Design?

UX stands for User Experience. According to the name coiner himself, Don Norman in the early 90s; User Experience encompasses all that UX is.

“I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.” - Donald Norman, UX Architect at Apple (the 1990s)

Now, I must say he is a pure genius for the shorthand ''UX'' when the experience begins with an E! Who does not love a creative name?

Back to the main character, two words. USER and EXPERIENCE. A user is anyone who needs something and applies an existing answer to that need. An experience, according to my trusty sidekick Google, is ''practical contact with and observation of facts or events'' and/or ''an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone''

When these two words come together, they create something extremely beautiful. User Experience, as simply as it can be put is the interaction a user has with a product or service. Now, User Experience Design(UXD), deals with the design elements that shape a user's experience. Think of having cable but no content to watch, the cable is the product but the content provided is UX because it is where the experience is.

Who can be a UX Designer?

Truthfully, I would say anyone can, as long as that person recognizes and gives genuine importance to the target users. Without Users, there is no experience.

UX Design also stands as an umbrella for career specifications. You could be well-versed in UX Design as a whole and you could choose to ''major'' in a particular field under UX Design. The four major fields I now know of - thanks to Friends of Figma Africa Bootcamp, are;

1. Experience Strategy

2. User Research

3. Information Architecture

4. Interaction Design

If you're interested in learning more about these UX Design fields, you could try using my trusty sidekick or see CareerFoundry. If you would like to, share what kind of designer you think you are and what kind you would like to be.

Why UX Design?

If you think about it, why do we need to design users' experiences? Let's take Hashnode for example. You are reading this article here and if Hashnode didn't do some UX Design, you wouldn't have gotten this far down the article- except of course, I am the next best thing to good old Shakespeare. UX Design helps to improve and shape a user experience by making it more efficient, friendly(easy to use) and most of all relevant.

For context, if Hashnode again, were to have this product but have no clear or easy way to access blog posts, it would frustrate its users. It is like having an alarm clock without any means to set the alarm, ugh! UX Design is necessary because we don't want to frustrate users but rather, we want them to feel at ease, be happy and achieve their goals successfully.

The UX Design Process

Generally, there are different ''frameworks'' (simply put, methods) that designers use to approach UX. Under one shed, however, they can be phased as;

User research, Design, Testing, and Implementation.

I will give brief overviews of these phases.

User Research deals with gathering deep insights into potential users and a product's competition.

Design deals with starting the actual work and this usually involves putting together a functional structure of how a user will start their journey from the beginning of your product to the end where they achieve their goal.

Testing involves putting your design decisions to the frontline. How will this design perform with an actual user? Will it be relevant, and user-friendly and give the user a seamless memorable experience? These are the questions and the answers lie when we check how well a design performs. Any errors identified in the design can be quickly attended to before an actual release of the design to real-world users.

Implementation is more technical in my opinion. Sure, you've designed something great, but can users achieve their goals with just design? The sad truth is no, they can't. Hence, here the design-development handoff occurs and we get a working model of our prototype/design.

In a nutshell, these phases envelop a lot of other frameworks and UX design methods.

Benefits and Limitations

Here, I will be highlighting some ways UX Design has benefited me at work in personal projects and even at school.

1. Empathy. Read that out loud again, and if you don't know the meaning, let's hear from Wikipedia.

   

   Being able to empathize with users has helped me have a different, less judgemental perspective towards humans in general. Of course, it's quite difficult a habit to suddenly master, but as a UX designer, I have learned to live with empathy first. When this becomes your situation, you find that researching and understanding your users is easier because you now genuinely don't want to judge them for their decisions, wants or backgrounds, but instead, you want to understand them to help them better.

2. Creativity. The UX Design process gives the perfect room for me to be insanely creative. In the UX Design process, at the ideation phase, there is no such thing as a bad idea. Doesn't that sound like a portal to a world of endless imaginations? That's my exact point. I get to fully exercise my mind and think of all possibilities without downsizing anyone as a stupid idea. With time, the ideas will be polished to check real-world feasibility, but until that time love; dare to dream!

3. Iteration. I watched an episode of Miraculous Ladybug where Hawkmoth kept using ''Fluff'' to go back in time and collect Ladybug and Cat Noir's miraculous. Though it was an extremely pathetic scene to watch (I think it's high time he gave up), it took me to a familiar part of UX Design which is iteration. It's so nice having the means to go back and make necessary corrections, especially after possible faults have been identified during testing.

4. Collaboration. This rings "Together we stand, divided we fall'' and a lot of other motivational- sometimes corny- quotes. Working with people is difficult but working with people is fun, and achieving a common goal is even more enjoyable. When we collaborate with others, it's no longer a you and I thing, it's a ''We'' thing. That builds professional experience, fosters communication and teamwork, fastens stronger workplace relationships and gosh the list goes on and on. A great woman once said;

   

   There are a lot more benefits online and even for others. Let's move on to limitations. I never thought UX Design had any limitations until I experienced some myself.

   1. Research. Yes, it is a concrete part of the whole design process but it can be unpredictable and challenging. Obviously, as designers, we should rise to the challenge, but it doesn't change the fact that we may encounter some obstacles like low response rates, technical issues, or unreliable data. We may also have to deal with some constraints, such as limited time, budget, or access to users. The good thing though, is that with UX Design, there is always a solution. In cases like this, we should be open-minded, patient, flexible and creative. After all, our product is nothing with zero concise research.

   2. Change. This industry is constantly evolving and trends are changing daily. What you know from a year ago might be outdated today. I know that this is a limitation for most, if not all careers and it is the same in UX Design. You must change with the trend. Let's get this clear, don't change but CHANGE. Did you get that? What am I saying? Think of yourself an as older Android or IOS version and your user needs to use an app that's only for the latest version. What does mean? you need to be updated! So update yourself as a designer, by keeping up with the changes and new trends in the industry.

How is UX Design being Heroic?

To me, the greatest superhero of all time has always been Batsy, as Harley would call him(if you think otherwise, argue with yourself). Nothing about him is mutated, he's human and he's just trying to make the world more humane. UX Design is the Batman of our "Gotham-ly" world(I've watched too many multiverse movies😭). It gives us the chance to truly focus on what makes Earth, Earth- humans and life as we know it. You would have noticed how the world is trying to be woke when it comes to matters of earth's depletion, societal and environmental pollution, and even climate change. Now we have realized just how important, the actions we make are and we try to shape our future experiences by leveraging humanity and technology toward an easier, more seamless tomorrow.

We have sadly come to the end of this article if it can be called one. If you got this far, thank you for reading this and I hope you found it most helpful. This might become a regular thing for me because I had so much fun writing this.

If you need me, you can find me on Twitter or you can find me on my couch binging all Batman classics. Wherever you do find me, there's always room for one more.

Butterflies in the sky, with this I say goodbye.