Designing for User Experience.

It's often said that "you can't design a user's experience", because you can't control exactly what the user will or won't do. What the user actually experiences versus what you presume they are going to experience can be two entirely different things, and even if you could design a site that solved the user experience issues for a particular user, there's no reason that same solution would work for anyone else. 

So what is the point of all this? No, you can't design a user experience, but the user experience can be modeled and used as a guideline for how to structure your design. 

At its simplest level, user experience design revolves around the concept of trying to ensure that the design meets the requirements of the end user. This sounds obvious on the surface of it, but so often it's completely overlooked. Sometimes the design is focused around aesthetics, or it's focused on appeasing internal company stakeholders, or it's focused on satisfying the brand's style guide - without a focus on the end user, they often end up being the LAST group to get any consideration, and yet, they're the ones using the site! 

The process we use for user experience design is quite simple - we look at the sorts of customers that will be visiting your website, and the sorts of things they will be looking for once they get there. Once we have established what the most important group of users are, and the most important thing they'll be looking for, then that is the thing we make the easiest to access on your site - and we go in a descending order from there. Obviously there's a lot more involved, you need to take information architecture into consideration, and of course there ARE aesthetic and stakeholder needs to consider, but all in all, designing for user experience is about taking the stuff that your users are looking for and making it stupidly easy to find. 

Of course, the only REAL way to tell whether the user experience you've designed is having the desired outcome is through user testing, but that's a whole other blog post... 

Assembler is a web design agency based in Perth, Western Australia. This blog is intended to be an informal, behind the scenes look into the web design and development industry. If you like our content, please follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook!