What is UI/UX Design? UI UX Design Process, Principles & Career Guide
What is UI/UX Design?
To further clarify, think about the process of ordering food online. How does a user locate the different meal options? What happens if a user attempts to order a meal and is not successful in making the payment? What is the process if a payment fails? How does the app guarantee that the ‘Order’ or ‘Pay’ button is the right size and in the right location? Is the text that provides instruction to the user or states the purpose of a button appropriately positioned and readable? What comes to mind when you think of a building? The floor plan is UX. Door signs and door handles are UI. UX and UI must be in harmony in a building for it to function correctly. Text and signs must be legible. The flow must be intelligent and intuitive.
Understanding the Design Process
The first step to designing a solution to a problem is NOT designing a pretty picture in illustrator. The true process starts after the problem has been determined. It is important to identify and uncover the actual problem through empirical research. Here are the general steps to reaching a solution:
- Conduct research to gain a deep understanding of the challenges your intended audience faces by identifying user behavior and needs. You will be able to develop user journey maps and identify user personas.
- Transform the challenge into an actionable statement. Using a design thinking methodology, you would create a concept of a potential solution to the challenge by forming a user story and creating a journey map or sitemap.
- The design solution would incorporate the functionality and features of the solution, and communicate the interaction of the solution with the user through a series of visuals and text, and high fidelity illustrations.
- The last step of the process is to determine the usability of the solution by conducting user experience testing. Users must uncover challenges and potential problems with the solution.
Designers hand off their work and developers build. Once a design is implemented, analysis shows where issues occur and what changes to make. This forms a continuous design and development cycle. There are lots of principles that inform design choices, and while most people skip this section, this is where design moves from opinion to fact. In design choices, there are a multitude of accessibility and usability issues. For color choices, there are accessible contrast ratios. A design program may say that a particular color meets the ratios, but in the real world, that may not be the case. Sometimes you have to test. There are also physical laws such as Hick's Law, which explains that more choices (options) leads to longer decision making time. This is why a designer or UX engineer should aim to give a user interface a single obvious primary action. Additionally, there's an 8-point design grid. This is a uniform method for design teams to size and space elements of a user interface. While designing and engineering are largely separate endeavors, an integration of design thinking and engineering practices produces better outcomes. This is especially the case with creation and continous improvement of design systems. Design Systems allow developers and designers to rapidly create multiple screens that comprise a single product. Design Systems are made up of design tokens. These are defined values for things like colors and type and are defined in both design and code. In code, tokens can be defined and used for things like colors and spacing. Using named tokens allows for easy updating of tokens across an entire design system. Using tokens in this way allows for rapid implementation of things like dark modes. Tokens can also be used to define interactions within a system. When tokens are defined in code and used by designers, designers can create interaction models within a product and other artifacts. Some places where good design and effective use of interface elements can be seen includes:
- Mobile banking: design can help prevent users from making mistakes
- E-learning: good design can aid in keeping users from getting lost
- Healthcare apps: Design can help implement plain language and accessibility
- E-commerce: design and effective use of search and other product filters can aid in improving usability
- AI Interfaces: good design can help users understand when an AI is not capable of performing a given task
User Experience (UX) Design at MIT Vishwaprayaag
The MIT Vishwaprayaag University (MIT Vishwaprayaag) Bachelor of Design (B.Des) focuses on specialist degrees in Product Design, Visual Design and User Experience (UX). As part of this program, you can expect:
- An immersive, design-studio environment;
- Speed and iteration oriented lessons through design sprints;
- Critiques to help develop design judgement and build a portfolio;
- Opportunities to learn and be mentored by practicing UX professionals;
- The ability to integrate your design knowledge with engineering and business principles and methods;
- To strengthen your portfolio and gain opportunities for employment through industry placements and internships;
The programs at MIT Vishwaprayaag cover a variety of areas and help you gain a broad spectrum of knowledge.
Design Careers
Some of the positions available to Design program graduates include User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design, Product Design, Motion Graphics Design and Design Research. While a background in programming isn’t essential for these roles, it would benefit your design practice to understand how an Interface is formed and built.
