Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

EVERYONE CAN DO AT LEAST SOME UX
All of these reasons why it’s valuable for UX designers to seek out collaboration with
team members are also reasons why anyone in digital product development, no matter
what role, should learn at least some of what UX is all about, even if they don’t actually
learn to apply the methods.
UX designers are not some exotic tribe from an island all their own; they are just
people with some good UX training and experience. The fact that everyone on a team has
some expertise they can bring to the UX process goes to show that it makes great sense for
people to make their way into the work from a wide range of prior non-UX experience. It
will not only help them to do their current jobs better but also their past experience will
help them to do UX work better. I certainly wish I had known more about interfaces when
I started. I had to put myself through that intensive self-taught method of obsessively
redrawing dozens of interface designs to really understand them as a medium.
If you’re a visual designer, incorporating UX methods into your work will enhance
your ability to please and inspire users with your designs by tapping into their emotions
and putting yourself in their place. It will also help you in presenting your design concepts
and gaining support for them. If you’re a front-end developer, UX practices are an
especially natural add-on and you’re definitely going to want to build up a good base of
UX knowledge. Not only will it help you create more effective and pleasing interfaces, but
it’s becoming more expected by both firms and clients that UX will be part of what you’ll
bring to the process. The hybrid role of UX developer is rapidly gaining ground, and
people with these combined skills are likely to be in increasingly high demand.
Back-end engineers can benefit from developing a deeper understanding of UX
concerns by being better able to propose improvements to the design of products based on
their systems knowledge. Learning to put themselves into the shoes of the wide range of
users will help them anticipate ways in which the product should be able to provide users
with information they’ll want and to factor those issues in from the very start of the backend
planning.
For product managers, given the overlap with the missions and tools of UX design,
learning more of the evaluation methods of UX makes great sense, and at plenty of
companies, product managers are now expected to oversee UX work for projects. I think
the part of UX that product managers would benefit most from is defining personas.
Studying user flows, sketching page designs, and providing guidance on where design and
system decisions fall in order of importance are also great enhancements of the product
manager’s core skill set. Wireframing and prototyping probably isn’t necessary because
there are generally going to be designers who can do those jobs, but knowing the ins and
outs of how to read wireframes and what to ask for in a prototype are essential.