I’m working in the IT sector for couple of years as a UX designer now, and I have come across different types of experiences with various clients. As we interact with clients there are a lot of expectations that we experience in the initial phase of the project. We, as a UX team, try our best to pour in novel ideas and efforts to make the product/app or site globally acceptable. However owing to different perspectives, clients have their own set of ideas as regards any design.
The job of the UX design team is to provide output in the form of images or click-through prototypes. Since UX stands for User experience Design, we have to take feedback from various users from time to time to ensure its “user centric-ness”. At such times the feedback sways from something like- “Change this color to Red. Blue isn’t looking good!”. “You should place this button on the top instead of bottom?” it doesn’t look good in there!”. “Can we get 5/6 design options in next 2 hours for this website?” and so on. Any feedback is valuable and it certainly helps us take the design a step further. However same is true with the fact that as experts in our field, one needs to trust our judgment even if there are can be different opinions on one design.
As mentioned earlier in this article, UX teams usually provide output in the form of images, mockups and sometimes click-through prototypes. In the process of ideating, right from the inception of the idea there are going to be inputs, inputs of all types! However any suggestion cannot be necessarily implemented, as it may come in the way of a design process.
Design is universal, it is for everyone but again, there’s this little truth that we are taught in the first day of the design school- Art that is based on personal liking and emotions is like driving your own car! You can ride it slow, fast, or safe as you wish to. Design on the other hand is like driving a taxi. You have to match the style of the people sitting behind in the taxi. In this analogy, the driver is the designer, the client is Taxi owner (who drives his own vehicle and rarely uses taxi) and passengers are the users. So the client can ask the designer to drive fast every time but it may not work every time.
Comments on design can be biased base on personal liking. But in design process, we have to approach the problems from a neutral perspective. For e.g. I like blue. My client likes blue too! But together we are designing a website for Barbie doll! The users are little princesses, who would like to see the website in pastel pinks and red! Same applies to the location of the buttons and behaviors of navigation! In order to arrive at this first, I would like to take you through the journey of the UX process. What you are about to read is just a heads up to what follows in the elaborate and deep process of designing in the later stages.
When you see a clean, neat and successful design, always remember that it has emerged from a deep mess of research, refinement and iterations. The UX process starts with a single statement that the client brings to us, which could be sometimes vague in its appearance and nature. It goes something like; “Stock market aiding application”, “Discount management application” “Bidding app for hotels” are just a few examples. This is where we step in. We conduct a thorough research about the types of people who are going to use the product, the places where this is going to prove helpful.
Then we also look at the competitors for the same. We then define the goals for the types of users and then arrive at the most difficult part: “HOW WOULD ANY USER LIKE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOAL WITH THIS TOOL!” This is like entering a warehouse where thousands of cubes, spheres, cones and various different shapes in different colors and sizes have been placed randomly! We start with sorting those shapes into logical grouping, for e.g. we can sort by color, we can sort by shape, and we can sort them by size and so on! This is where the information architecture gets frozen. To give you the perspective, this is something that the user sees in a small navigation bar on top of any website. In case of mobile, all this is practically hidden in the small menu icon!
We now discuss the Wireframe part. This is where we carefully place each element based on its relevance to the goal the user wants to achieve, frequency of use, dependency of the action on other elements and ease of access required. This is where the part one of the processes halts.
Now coming to the look and feel part of it, the process starts with defining the branding guidelines. Visual designers start with the mood board. Mood board is based on the analogies and keywords which are derived from the core of the products. These keywords are often kept abstract such as flashy or subtle, edgy or soft, warm or cold etc. Images in the mood board are selected to create a color palate. This is the color barcode, which holds information about which color to be used and to what extent it can be used on any page of the website!
Now once the color barcode is defined, the visual strategy is brought into place. This is a document where we define all the possible styles that all the elements can have, based on their role on that particular page. For e.g. A visual strategy document holds information about the styling of primary action buttons, secondary action buttons, tertiary action buttons, hyperlinks, titles, body texts, paragraph headers, spacing, background colors and textures, navigation bar styles and mouse-over stages of each of them!
After this the designer merges the two together to form the deliverable from the UX team. So at this stage, what the users actually see is only 20% of the tip of the iceberg.
So here’s a sneak peek at why it may not be always possible to implement all the ideas that are being suggested and that it takes a lot more than mere art to create a viable and practical design!