User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

 

User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

 

Elements of User Experience

I watched a very informative YouTube video called The Elements of User Experience the creators name is “Mitchell Eva UX” and he is a lead UX and Digital Product designer. This video went through 5 layers in user experience that help one another when forming a product, the five layers are Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and surface.

Strategy 

Here you would define the reason for the product and who you are designing it for. You would ask yourself things like who are the users what their needs are and things of that nature and if it’s IFDS which stands for Innovative, Feasible, Desirable and Sustainable. Innovative meaning is it a new type of thing or a new way of doing the same thing, Feasible meaning do you have the time, money, and resources to even accomplish the goals required, Desirable meaning does it matter to user and will they want to use the end product and lastly sustainable meaning is this product something that will grow overtime.

Scope 

This is where some designers tend to struggle at times and it’s where you plan things for the product and to keep things organised and realistic like the functional requirements, the type of content that will be included and also designated roles in the team explaining who will be assigned to what tasks.

Structure 

This is where you create a structure for the product development asking yourself what the big clusters are and what form the informational architecture will take and how users will be expected to interact with the site and how the site will respond to that.

Skeleton 

This is the stage where you determine the layout, order grouping and positioning of things and asking yourself things like how will we arrange things to make it easier for users to navigate through and find what they need, how do we expect users to go from page to page and how can information be presented so users will understand it.

Surface

This is all about what you see as a user like the logos, text, icons and illustration whether that’s functional or aesthetic the user will see it so you ask yourself things like is the text big enough are the animations clean and not sore to the eyes and do the colours match properly so you can see any text on top of colours and are things like buttons clickable and a good size.

Mitchell then went on to discuss later penetration this is all about layers and are you designer at the right layer and what you plan to do to achieve more layer penetration by carrying out things like user testing or workshopping a new solution. As a designer your number one priority should be to provide the best experience for the user. It’s all about pushing seeping into the layers of user experience through the project with your team and communicating throughout it well carrying out all necessary steps. These layers don’t have to be completed in order or one by one but can be worked on concurrently as well.

The Relationship between CMS and UX

This is an article I read written by James Whitehead on The Relationship of CMS and UX. 

 

First the article went through what UX, and UI design is and what their relationship to each-other is all about.

 

UX Design

User experience is more or less entirely based on the users experience and how they interact with the interface and that a positive or negative experience can greatly impact the image of the organisation brand like for example if it doesn’t load properly or things take too long to load.

 

UI Design 

User interface is more about the visual format the user interacts with so things like the menu functionality, colours, font and illustration. The UI designer must make the General functionality of the website a positive experience for the user in terms of the layout and design made to it.

 

UX and UI relationship

These two go together well because one is all about how the user will interact with the site and the other being all about how everything will look and feel to the user so they both go hand in hand together to create the final and most optimal end product for the user.

 

After this the article talked about Content management systems improving UX and UI experience and how it does that.

 

Content management systems 

Content management exists to help people organise, showcase, edit, publish and mange content easily. CMS helps structure the UI and improve the UX.

 

A good CMS will allow the organisation and to add content and customise their website.

 

A strong CMS had a centralised dashboard and there you can access customisation features and can clear SEO functionality which makes sure the website utilises keywords capable of making pages in search engine rankings and to drive traffic.

 

A content management system has to provide mobile responsiveness features

as most people browse the internet with their phones and prefer making purchases on a computer. 

References

Elements of User Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5jtbUwyvhM&ab_channel=MitchellEvaUX

The Relationship between CMS and UX

https://weareuv.com/the-relationship-between-cms-ux/

Image 1

https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/5-elements-of-ux-design/

Image 2

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2018/08/secure-content-management-system