The Balance Between Great UX Design and Effective User Interface Design

We’ve all walked through more doors than we can possibly remember—doors in homes, at work, in office buildings…you get the idea. But think back to the last time you had trouble entering or exiting a door. Maybe you tried to push a door meant to be pulled, or pulled one meant to be pushed.

Was it your fault? What went wrong?

How design thinking informs great UX and UI design

That door you encountered is referred to as a Norman Door, named after Don Norman who discussed this concept of poorly designed doors in his book The Design Of Everyday Things.

And no, you weren’t wrong. Put simply, that door gave you the wrong message. It indicated to you that an incorrect action was needed to complete the task—it suggested a pull action was required for a door that needed to be pushed. It’s an example of a poorly designed user experience.

Confusing and poorly designed interactions with ambiguous affordances can be found all around us. Affordances can be described as perceivable action possibilities, for example: buttons give the impression that they can be pressed and knobs the ability to be turned.

Sometimes we get accustomed to poor affordances and even change our habits and the way we’d naturally interact. But as designers, it’s important to design products that are frictionless and enjoyable to use.

From Norman doors to websites we encounter everyday, user experience is the conceptual framework we can use to understand what makes certain experiences good, and others bad or frustrating. And good user experience design can then be considered the practice or system that designers can follow to ensure good user experiences.

Effective User experience design is universally focused on User’s Needs

If you’re reading this article, odds are you’re thinking about user experience solely from a digital perspective. But the original term, also coined by Don Norman, refers to the total human experience that encompasses all aspects of a product or service—physical or digital.

For example, user experience refers to everything from purchasing the product, unboxing it, using it, to troubleshooting it and even customer support interactions. In this way, user experience should take into account the entirety of the customer experience, not just the tangible design or output of a product or service.

While we as digital designers don’t often have the luxury of contemplating the outcome of our efforts, it’s important to consider the context that your website or application is being used in, and when possible to design with those parameters in mind.

Let’s say you’re designing an application for an outdoor construction company, where the majority of users will be using the application in sunlight. How would you approach the design process? It’s important to consider every possible facet users may face as they experience your product.

How do user experience designers create effective user experience design?

If we look at user experience (UX) today, especially for digital products, we tend to find a structure that leverages research and observation to develop ideas intended to solve the needs and desires of a targeted audience.

Once identified, these solutions can then be used to conduct user testing, which when properly structured will identify further pain-points. Through this iterative process, prototype solutions can be developed over time that best meet the needs of the user.

It is the job of user experience designers to oversee this process, all with the goal of creating a good product that improves user interaction, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Good UX is intentional and focused on the end-user

User experience design should be structural and follow a process, though the process should change depending on the circumstances. It should be not random and should not be based on gut feelings and intuitions. Although the results may attempt to appear intuitive for the audience it’s designed for, the intent behind the solution should be methodical and well-researched.

Despite the importance of user experience design, UX research is often overlooked. What marketers and developers don’t always understand is that user research is critical to successful user experience design.

Insights and user truths gathered from user research should drive the user experience design process. Some common user research strategies include:

• user interviews

• focus groups

• A/B testing

• field testing

Other strategies that help guide the design process include creating user personas and direct usability testing with prototypes. User experience designers are also typically responsible for designing the wireframes and subsequent prototypes for usability testing.

Remember, little research is better than none at all. True insights and discoveries are found in people—even the simplest insights can turn into the best design practices. Furthermore, research can be carried out throughout the entire design process.

What makes good user experience design?

User experience design is a multidisciplinary field that combines elements of psychology, design, and technology. It can be complicated without proper understanding but should not be dismissed because of its complexity. It’s integral to any product design cycle.

Good user experience design should operate like the ideal door that Don Norman described. Functional, seamless, and easy to use. User experience designers should strive to create low friction design solutions that can improve usability, usefulness, and performance.

Good user experience designers recognize that they are not designing for themselves. They put themselves in the shoes of their users and are able to truly understand their user’s needs, desires, and behaviors. They utilize research and design tools agnostically to build solutions suitable for their users, as it’s common for user experience designers to work across different industries, age groups, and user profiles.