On a personal note, I cannot be any more excited to learn about User Experiences in class, especially this week.
As I have noted on an earlier post, I built my experiences as a (social media) marketer and a brand manager with a focus on analytics and design sense–and although companies (especially startups in early stages) that hire me may find it efficient to have a go-to person for small tasks from flyer design to high-level business strategies, on an entry-level job seeker and her co-workers’ end it may make things more difficult to collaborate because I would get overly picky about design details and even programming details with the limited amount of knowledge I have. To subsidize the frustration for both parties (me vs. designers and engineers), I started learning the basics of design software to 1) make things myself and 2) get my ideas across in a more efficient style; and after a little over 1 year of slow development from drawing mock-ups and wireframes on paper and making flyers with Microsoft Publisher to designing websites, company logos, and mobile app designs on Photoshop and making brochures on InDesign, I can finally say that I feel comfortable being called a graphic designer.
Just earlier last week I began working my current startup’s mobile app design and website in collaboration with an outsourced UI/UX designer, and faced the same dilemma again: me designing a product as a brand manager and product developer while having little to no experiences in UX design made the communication quite complicated and inefficient, more so because our designer wasn’t in-house. I started interviewing friends who work as creative directors or UI/UX/Graphic designers to figure out the difference between a general designer and UX specialized designers, and upon finally understanding that what I have been designing wasn’t only based on making products look pretty but also on how users may use it with an easy, time-saving, and ever-interesting experiences, and that exactly was the fundamentals of UI and UX. And I realized that it was easier for me to understand the ultimate goal of creating a better user experience based on my studies on analytics–where you as a marketer or web developer must always measure the number of visitors, number of clicks, which SEO worked, which blog posting your audiences shared or liked the most, and minimize the bounce rate, all based on how the users may perceive your website, mobile app, or social media platforms.
Last weekend between working on the website landing page design, I was researching a career as a creative director or a communication designer. Although it seemed that it was exactly what I was looking for and that I was close to being on a right-ish track (despite the fact that there is no ‘right’ track for this job, according to successful creative directors and brand designers), I still need to learn and build experiences in UI/UX among other skillsets, hence the excitement for this week’s course materials.
As explained in Jesse James Garret’s “Elements of User Experience”, UX isn’t limited to websites or mobile apps (although the term became more popular with the emergence of the screen devices) but has been around us this whole time in forms of magazines, machines, and just about anything that we as humans experience. The key is to understand the needs that exist and how to efficiently solve that problem with your product. UX isn’t only about the aesthetics of the product, but also the usability and interface.
Preliminary mobile app design from last week for a 3D printing startup company