UX design overview - Adobe XD Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video we're going to start with sort of figuring out what UX design is all about, but most important of all, we're going to pay attention to those two little letters before the word design, UX. So what is UX? UX is short for user experience, and over the past few years the term UX has become a buzzword in the industry. What it means is this: UX basically makes things easier and intuitive for the client when he or she interacts with our apps, websites or other digital products. Though a lot of information around UX is out there on the web and in articles and books, they actually add more confusion to the term than clarity, and when you clear out all of the smoke, it really comes down to this: UX is common sense. Let me give you an example. I have a parking app for my Android device that lets me pay for parking in my city. When Google updated the Android system to Android version 10, the app stopped working because it wasn't compatible with that version. In fact, I got an alert to that effect from the parking app, a bad user experience. Common sense would've forced the team to discover this and pay attention to the announcement months ahead and fixed it shortly after the release. Six months later, that app still does not work. When I buy something on a website and enter my Visa number, the odds are pretty good I will have to enter it twice because the entry field required the numbers to be either separated by dashes or just use the straight string of numbers on the card. Common sense would've identified this issue and dealt with it before the site went out into the wild. We have all encountered sites where a video ad starts playing automatically. Apply common sense and you would think the designer or whomever would ask someone if they would rather play the video themselves and not have to play it automatically. These are just three examples of where the user's experience with the project is not a good one, and with all of those examples there are three implications. The first is the user will get frustrated and simply leave. If enough users abandon the project and take to social media, the odds are pretty good they and a lot of others won't be coming back. And the third is a financial implication. In those three cases, the parking company's going to lose my account and the potential revenue from it. In the second, the shopping cart is filled with items and left in the aisle. The third item is a loss of ad revenue because the videos contain ads and those ads generate income. These three examples also explain the importance of UX design in today's digital environment. You simply can't make it up as you go along. As you will see in this chapter, before lighting up one pixel you have to clearly know who you user is and have a pretty clear idea of why the user has your app on their device or visit your website and how they will use it. Though you will need to know how they will move through the project in a painless manner, you will need to design the project in such a way that wherever they are in the project they know who you are and where they are. To do this, you will need to bring a lot of skillsets to bear on the project. These will include market researchers, UI designers, two highly trained coders. You're going to have to go through numerous iterations of the project on a regular basis and you're going to have to do a lot of user testing, and that means that you're going to have to add that dash of common sense to the project and then ask complete strangers to try out your project on a regular basis and then be prepared to change things based on their feedback. Along the way, you will discover there is a lot more to UX design than Photoshop, Adobe Experience Design, Illustrator, Sketch and other software technologies. You will discover UX design is a reactionary process as you adapt and react to user and team feedback at all stages of the project, from paper to handoff to the development team. What it all comes down to is something I have been advocating for over a decade: fall in love with the user and not the technology. When you think about that, it really is nothing more than common sense.