UX designer, one of the sexiest jobs in today’s digital world. The UX itself stands for User Experience. UX designer is someone who designs and makes sure a customer journey of a product or service run smoothly.
What do these people design? They design the experience, journey, flow, everything that matters to customers. In fact, UX designer plays an important role in all customer journeys. Starting from when a customer knows nothing about the product until he/ she interested to purchase or participate in it, the designer must be able to identify all the gaps and possibilities of how a customer might think and do.
Let me give you an example. You must have heard about Chatbot. The smart machine that can answer anything through messaging. It relies on UX a lot! To make the chatbot sounds like a human and respond like a human there are much creative thinking, research and customer-mind involved!
At a glance, the job might sound kinda easy. Some of you might say, ‘Ah, well I’m a customer so I know what I want. I just need to design it’.
Nah, unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
The job requires a customer-centric mind, creativity and ability to work systematically.
A customer-centric mind
This is my favourite one.
I remember, one of the lecturers in my master’s keep mentioning this word — as if it’s the only thing marketer needs to care. And, it’s true.
Customer-centric is where a company or brand put their feet in their customer shoes, understand what they need and find a solution for that. The theory starts with a problem and ends with a solution. Not the other way around, like pushing our product to the market and hope the customer will like it, which I often find it happens in the society.
Some entrepreneurs have brilliant ideas, amazing products, showcasing the coolest technology ever — but do customers really need it?
The same thing with user experience (UX). We, as the designers, need to know how do our customers think, use the product, interact with the brand, or what if something unpleasant happens — how will they complain? Every possibility of how a customer might react and say should be taken into account.
Customer, customer, customer.
We have to act like customers as if we know nothing about the product. Does the instruction make sense? What if I want to cancel, can I do that easily? Can I share this product to my friends?
So how you can tail it down?
Always focus on your target market. In case you haven’t had one, make a clear segmentation before you start. Analyse your customers’ behaviour, demographic and psychological traits.
Then, try to understand who are you talking to. How they communicate with each other? How they use the product? How often do they use it?
Remember, you are not serving every single person in this earth.
Creativity
There are reasons why this role is called as a ‘designer’. One of them is because the creativity skill required. Somehow, in my head, I always think designer as a creative person (am I right?).
In what scope that a UX designer needs to be creative? In every aspect.
Creating the customer journey or user’s conversational flow require a designer to be as creative as possible. Thinking what would be the best words to describe a context, identifying every single possibility that user may ask or request and being able to create a seamless experience.
Let’s take chatbot for an example. The process of creating the UX requires the designer to create an engaging conversation, proposing out-of-the-box ideas and collaborating all of it to a simple and fun chat.
Depending on what kind of platforms are you designing, the job may also require lots of colour scheme, thesaurus, pictures even videos!
Collaborative
Yes, I know it’s a designer, many marketing and creative thinking is required to be in this position. However, you need to remember that you’ll work with the IT team — the one that makes your design into reality.
Coming from a marketing background, I found this very new. I used to work in a very dynamic environment and often have no access to the back-end people.
Apparently, working as a UX designer requires you to collaborate not only with the creative and business people of the project. A good communication and collaboration with the IT team is a must.
There are so many technical aspects behind the fancy ‘UX designer’ name. A UX designer needs to be able to systematically, understanding the technical limitation, the building schedule, testing, quality assurance, basically all aspects.
UX designer is the cutting edge of the technology. We create things and constantly improve it to make it better. Afterall, we are the ones who make you fall in love with your favourite digital products :)