UX Research

 What is UX design?

A couple of years ago I wouldn't have known what this was, cut to now where not only am I learning more about UX design I am also finding ways to implement it into my own work.

UX design essentially means "user experience ", this means what the user is faced with once they use a website. 

We have been slowly learning how to change our own websites and find ways that make a user's experience much better when using our websites throughout our college course. You may think that not a lot of thought goes into things like this and that most of it is common sense but it does get quite tricky at times when you are trying to make something a lot simpler than it is. 

I started to research more about UX design for my own knowledge to understand how I can make my websites more appealing to users. 

I found this brilliant article called 10 useful articles for UX designers which gives us a heading about different things regarding UX design and then it allows us to visit that site through a simple click of the heading name.

The first article I read was "why User experience is vital for a company", It emphasises on the fact that

search engines are shifting their focus to more human experience. This is a clever tactic used by companies that want their consumers to feel more comfortable using their websites.

Some things that make a website's user experience great are the site is speedy it is mobile friendly

and very easy to navigate through and able to find what you are looking for in the least amount of time while using their website.

previously websites focused mostly on creating sites that suited the servers and not the users as much. fast forward to today and search engines are now able to gather data and create new ways and ideas to improve their user's experience while using the web. 

For the second part of my research, I watched a TED TALK that discussed the psychology behind UX design

the psychology behind UX design

This was an interesting talk and I really liked how they made UX design more visual and understandable. It is also very clever how UX design manipulates us in a way and how we can use it to potentially improve our work. The speaker Harrish Murugesan talks about how the layout of a website can affect our feelings and how using a specific colour scheme can affect the outcome of your work as well and it is also a very important factor when using UX design. I found it thought-provoking when Harrish spoke about Google and their web layout because we use google on a daily basis and we are familiar with their search bar being the main focus yet we don't really pay much attention to the icons they place at the top right-hand corner of the web page resulting in not many people using those functions. 

He also goes into how important colours are for companies and how some companies have even gone so far ahead to sue other companies for using a similar shade of colour as theirs.

One thing I didn't think had anything to do with UX design was Sound and it was interesting to see how all our senses are taken into account when using UX design. He further talks about how higher-frequency sounds can make users more alert about what they are doing while using websites,

what really took me by surprise is the little details that we overlook that contribute to UX design such as liking an image of someone on Instagram and there is a little vibration, all these factors into why we use certain apps more or enjoy them more than others. It is crazy how he uses this as a parallel to casino slot machines and the vibrations it uses when you win prizes. 

It really makes you think about your daily life and how much of this you tend to overlook such as how Spotify adapts its playlists suggestions to songs you have previously listened to or genres that they think you might like based on what you searched for.

He further talks about how this technology is evolving constantly to keep up with human needs who tend to get bored from repetitive things quite quickly. 

In a way, this technology is truly incredible but at the same time it is scary knowing that ur devices have this level of power and ability to mould themselves to fit our lives and makes us more dependent on technology.

Overall this talk was really interesting and really makes you think about what happens behind the scenes within all our technology and what goes on in order to be able to develop them.