A User Experience (UX) Designer typically helps you to understand your customers behaviours and improves the user experience of your online brand, your website or app, the effectiveness of your digital marketing or helps you to define your digital goals before you even get started.
As a User Experience designer, I apply 'design thinking' frameworks to your business challenges.
Design thinking refers to a set of practices and methodologies used throughout our industry. Practices that range from rapid iteration and prototyping to user research. In short, design thinking is a problem-solving approach.
This means you can apply it to almost any business problem. From the creation of an effective brand and website, to solving marketing or sales problems or even shaping your entire company structure and culture.
For your brand to provide a better experience, it will first need to understand its audience.
Fortunately, most of what you need to know about your users already exists within your team and just requires collating and extracting from the heads of key team members and where there are gaps, they can be filled using feedback and surveys, user interviews and reviewing various forms of analytics.
Most of the time the challenge isn’t gathering the data, but rather expressing it in a way that is useful or innovative for you to work with.
Develop an understanding of what your customer is trying to achieve by employing user research techniques.
Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook
The best solutions are not always immediately apparent and so different approaches need testing.
To achieve this, I will often visualise a solution, then build a prototype on which to carry out testing.
That is why I work with many clients over the long-term and alongside your design, sales and marketing teams to continually optimise and improve the user experience of your website.
You won’t find me just re-designing your website. But you will find me working alongside my clients to incrementally improve it.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
Creating a great online experience isn’t achieved by purely improving the usability of your website or application.
Often it requires a long-term vision to build a strategy and a road-map of actionable insights that outline what needs to be done and when to reach your goals.
The only problem with strategies though is that they often lack granular detail, and as we all know, the devil is in the detail.
You quickly learn that no company has ever succeeded implementing a strategy only as it was written and there is always the need to adjust as we go along.
Develop a strategy that defines your customer needs and identifies goals to meet.
Paul Boag, Boagworks and Headscape
Having a strategy is excellent, but if your teams or your digital and marketing suppliers don’t have the right guidance, it can lead to chaos.
Before long the brand experience becomes fractured as too many people are managing too much online content without coordination.
I work with clients to create design systems and frameworks within which everybody can work to ensure a consistent user and brand experience.
Develop design systems that help to manage your websites, marketing and design activities.
Clint Runge, Archrival
Alongside organisational and strategic changes, one of the most significant challenges is working with company management and employees.
It is impossible to deliver a quality service to users without buy-in from your team and it's not enough to tell them to change; we need to inspire them to want to change.
I help my clients do this by creating training programs that range from workshops and inspiring presentations all the way through to self-learning video guides and internal comms campaigns.
Create training programs that range from workshops and inspiring presentations all the way through to self-learning video guides and internal comms campaigns.