Last week, we introduced you to a new series of articles about UX Design. You can find our previous article "UX is everything. Everything is UX" to gain some context about what you'll read here.

Now on to the next point. After the introduction which fairly talks about how UX is based on combining innovation and common sense, naturally now we come to understanding how the process works.

What exactly does a UX Designer do? How do they reach the decision of what makes your website or your mobile app a good UX? Here are the five major questions that are the foundation of UX Design.

Q1: What is this website/mobile app supposed to help user accomplish? (Idea Refining)

Answer: This is the most important question. Everything revolves around this.

Your business website is supposed to inform your customer about your business. A mobile app, lets say, a texting app, is supposed to guarantee sending a text to the chosen recipient. A UX Designer establishes this core functionality and how to emphasize it. When a UX designer asks this question, they intend to eliminate all the noise and hoopla about features and UI and offers and whatnot. They distill the idea to one simple line. "What will this do?"

Q2: How will this website/mobile app help user accomplish the task? (Problem Solving)  

Answer: Once UX Designer knows what a website/mobile app is supposed to help the user with, next comes how. How should your business website inform the user of your offers? s your website being clear and honest? Is it providing the information that is useful to the user? Is it providing the information without making the user work for it? Is it prompt and forthcoming?

If you have a mobile app, what problem is it solving? Texting is expensive. Are you providing free texting? Does that mean you will provide ads? Are your ads interfering with the texting between users? Is it solving a problem but adding a new one?

Q3: Who is the customer? Who is the end-user? (Preparing the foundation for User Base)

Answer: Now comes identifying your audience. Until now, the UX designer knows what a website/mobile app's core function is and why it is helpful. Now we find out who is it supposed to help.

For example, if you are a startup and you have a business website, is your website's offer relevant to a housewife? Are you catering to businessmen? To kids? To sports fans? To the medical community? Which section of society will benefit if they know and use the services/products your business is offering?

In a mobile app, this goes the same. You have free texting app. Is your app for teenagers? Are you targeting the people who prefer to text or call? What about your ads? If you are targeting the teenagers, should you be posting ads in between the texting?

Q4: What is the good time to start collecting User feedback?

Answer: Now you know everything about your offering. What does it do, who is for, why should they use it? You have had your business website built. You have your mobile app out in the market.

Naturally you'll have user feedback. Is it the right time for the feedback to be taken into consideration? Is your website/mobile app sufficiently covering the target audience to generate an objective feedback? Are you being hasty and paranoid? UX Designers pay a great amount of attention to feedback. But they also make sure to pick a good amount of time to pass before that. User feedback is often tricky and make a UX design go viral with positive/negative reactions.

Q5: What can we do to improve? What can be added/eliminated on the basis of feedback?

Answer: You got your website/mobile app designed, developed and deployed. You know the users used it. You collected the feedback from relevant sources. Now you go over it. UX Designers study the User Feedback and compare it with their own thought process that went into the UX design.

Based on that comparison, which results in positive or negative, a UX Designer asks what can be done to improve? Is your business website too cluttered? Is it too sparse? Are the services that are important to your users visible and accessible?

In a mobile app, lets say the user feedback is that the ads interrupt the flow of the conversation. Do we need the ads? Lets say yes, you do. Now where can we put the ad so it does not interrupt? After all a mobile is a small interface. There's only so much space. You cannot put it at the top, that's where the user's name and number and picture comes. You cannot put it at the very bottom because that's the space keyboard occupies. You cannot put it on the sides because it might make the keyboard or the conversation look cramped in. So what do we do to make the UX better? Do we need ads in the chat screen? Can it be placed in some other screen? How about a quick screen that flashes after login but before the contact list? Is that enough?

These are all major questions which then extend and break down into several smaller but equally important ones. UX Design asks a lot of questions in order to understand the bottlenecks. Without these questions, functioning on pure intuition is like flying blind.

UX designers use common sense with well informed actions to minimize the errors and make the usability as simple as possible.

Coming soon: Now that you know the creative process of a UX Designer, you need to remember some presumptions that you will have to avoid in UX Design. Next week, we bust out the myths of UX design. Stay tuned.

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