How to be a user experience designer

What exactly you do at work? How to be a user experience designer? So you use sketch or photoshop? These are some questions I’ve been asked whenever I tell people that I work as a user experience designer.

As I’m from the gaming industry, I seldom bail out saying that I design games to those who really dont understand what user experience is (Yeah, that’s bad, I know, Im working on it).

Why user experience designing is relevant?

I once watched famous video from Simon Sinek, in which he said “Start with why” and that’s exactly what we are going to do now. Why does the industry need user experience designer?

During my first stint as a designer, I’ve been once told that, “Hey, we are going to pitch ourselves to the investors, and we will be surfacing our developers as the team but not you, as you are a designer”. Later I learned that, you can put all the sophisticated tech in your product, but if your user can’t understand that or make use of that, they are not going to use your product to its full potential. Thats it.

Jazz your product with all the tech that you can find, but if your user can’t understand it, they are not gonna use it.

User experience is basically the whole product experience, how the button clicks feel, How it looks, customer service and the whole big games. I recently read “Vandalisation of UX” (https://medium.com/spotless-says/the-vandalisation-of-ux-f38058d9a497) in a medium publication called Spotless says and they actually used the following picture to explain UX, which sums everything.

How to be a user experience designer?

I once read a twitter post from John made and it quotes:

“To be a good designer you must be a good engineer in every sense: curious, inquisitive.” - Charles Eames

Considering this as a relatively big topic, I’m going to split this into multiple podcasts lasting 10min approx.

1. Laws of User experience designing (https://lawsofux.com)
2. Usability Heuristics (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/)
3. Cognitive Walkthrough (https://measuringu.com/he-cw/)
4. Gestalt principles in user interface (https://medium.muz.li/gestalt-principles-in-ui-design-6b75a41e9965)
5. Accessibility - Part 1 (http://accessibilitymanifesto.com/introduction#What-are-the-Web-Content-Accessibility-Guidelines)
6. Accessibility - Part 2 (https://medium.com/confrere/automatically-creating-an-accessible-color-palette-from-any-color-sure-e735c3f2f45e)
7. Design for user-well being (https://humanebydesign.com)
8. Getting started in behavioural economics (https://uxplanet.org/the-top-5-behavioural-economics-principles-for-designers-ea22a16a4020)
9. Design thinking (https://medium.com/@cwodtke/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-design-thinking-f1142bab60e8)
10. Design Sprints vs Agile (https://designsprint.newhaircut.com/design-sprints-vs-agile-dev-sprints-af5f1d74f2ec) // refer https://www.gv.com/sprint/
11. Product Design process (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/comprehensive-guide-product-design/)

At this point refer videos every designer should watch in notion

12. Product Thinking (https://medium.com/@jaf_designer/why-product-thinking-is-the-next-big-thing-in-ux-design-ee7de959f3fe)
13. Strategies and best practices for conducting UX surveys (https://design.google/library/survey-methods-connecting-global-audience/)
14. UX checklist (https://uxchecklist.github.io)
15. Defining use cases using story boarding (https://uxplanet.org/storyboarding-in-ux-design-b9d2e18e5fab)
16. Interaction design and flows (https://uxplanet.org/an-introduction-to-interaction-flows-a4f783402529)

Phew, that’s quiet big, feel free to comment down your requirements and we will try to address them in the upcoming episodes as well. Till then, Happy designing.