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Why UX is important
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User Experience is more than enabling users to easily complete everything they need with a product or service. Exceptional UX creates an emotional bond, from the first interaction to the moment a user powers-down and signs-off. A fantastic UX creates an emotional bond, causing users and customers to become advocates. Creating wonderful, functional products through a focus on user experience helps businesses and organizations to achieve successful results. Efficient, streamlined interfaces that have given thought to what the user needs to perform help to drive more sales, convert more potential customers, or increase productivity within business apps. This direct relationship to achieving success has moved UX from being an afterthought and into the forefront of all planning for creating apps and websites, and shows why UX is important in modern app development and website design.
By placing the user experience as the primary objective, everyone involved in a project is focused on making a successful product that meets the needs of the user: designers, developers, business analysts, and product managers. From creating personas, building wireframes, designing mock-ups, information architecture, and developing prototypes, everything is done with the user in mind. This doesn’t exclude business objectives, rather these are integrated so that the user’s needs come first.
A concentrated effort by different departments and talents also requires these different groups to communicate, and even track a project after it is initially launched so that it can be improved and iterated. Discovering what a customer likes most about a site, what can be improved, and whether it is meeting their needs. Putting all this information together because of an emphasis on user experience helps allow a product to succeed both in the short and long-term.
Learning UX Skills
With user experience playing such an important role in business strategy, it is useful to consider attending UX classes and user experience workshops to learn UX skills. These educational sessions can help all involved in the app or website development process to understand and prioritize customer expectations, and deliver exceptional experiences. User experience courses and UX workshops help to establish a focus on user needs, along with emphasizing a page design and screen design that meets both user and business needs.
The foundational concepts of user experience design helps to create satisfied customers and users, establishing a foundation for the long-term success of your brand in a digital format. Overall, whether you’re a designer, developer or another part of a project team, participating in ongoing UX education provides benefits that extend beyond your individual career, helping to create a successful foundation for your business.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices. Jennifer holds a Master of Science (MS) degree in Human Factors in Information Design.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute.