Studio Brief 4 - UX design and working w/ Web Developers - Commercial Considerations

UX DESIGN

The use of designing with the user in mind should be the for most important aspect when design any form of responsive website. User experience is essentially to allow the user to comfortable get from point A - Z without any thought. Normally this is set up in order for the company to understand their target audience and for them to buy their products but it can also be used as a tool to subconsciously influences the users actions by the way the website has been set up and this is the case for many companies in the past but which is often looked down upon or illegal.

UX design includes a lot of aspects then just creating a website. In fact most time it's not even their job to create the end visuals for the site. They are there in order to successfully figure out the needs of the user and how they can influence there behaviour to get them where the business wants them to be, which is buying some kind of product. UX designers gather research by using people who are an active user of the site and then using means of interviewing and questionnaires just to see how they would improve the sites usability based on the feedback. 

Another form of research is using a hot spot software and using Google analytics. Back when I done my UX apprenticeship we used a hot spot software in which you could take any website then uploading it to this piece of software (forgot the name of it!) and it will generate a heat map along with other data on aspects like where the users eyes will be when they first land on the website, essentially where they look and where they don't. Generating this data can be used by the UX designers to change their mock ups depending on what works and what doesn't from the hot spots. Another method is collaborating with the analytics team. The analytics team who's job it would be to collect data from Google analytics. The kind of data they collect are the following:

• How many page views the website is getting
• What is the most viewed page
• How long their spending on that page
• How many weekly/monthly/yearly view they're receiving
• What's the first page they land on
• Do they click on any call the action buttons

 These are only a few of what the analytical team can provide from using Google analytics.

But you can work with the analytics team to gather a better understanding of how the user interacts with the website and to adjust accordingly through producing wire frames. Once the UX team gathers all the research they can then apply that data into their wire frames. However, if the research still hints that more development needs to be done then the UX team would go back to the research stage and again test it to see if the results are improving and that cycle will never end until the goals of the company have been met.

WEB DEVELOPERS

Working with developers is extremely important in order to communicate your visuals and wire frames. Web developers are not designers so therefore wouldn't pick up if a part of the design isn't looking like the mock ups as they are only interested in the coding aspect. This makes it important to keep on communicating back and forth to make sure things are running smoothly. Also web developers will always been in the way of your vision becoming a reality. If you come up with a crazy feature in your mock ups but you don't know if it's achievable then the web developers would be able to give their advise if it's possible or not. So keeping a tight back and firth relationship allows for a more productive approach to the design work. And just because some fancy animation works on the desktop doesn't mean it will work when it's responsive. Keeping in mind the restraints coding has. If the company has a big budget then you could achieve anything but if the budget is small then more likely anything fancy wouldn't be possible as it's more money and time for the company and web developers.