💡The UX Process

Learn what UX design is and become better at UX with our curated books, articles, activities, & processes.

📚Books | 📃Articles | ⚡Activities | ⚙️Processes

What is UX Design?

User Experience Design (UX Design) is the conscious iterative process of designing experiences of a product by keeping in mind the people that will use them. While traditional design focuses on crafting beautiful visuals, UX design takes that one step further.

UX design focuses on putting the user first, understanding their problems, empathizing with them, and accordingly designing a solution and testing it's effectiveness and usability.

This craft is valued by many top companies today because of the monetary benefit UX designers bring to the table. They can not only identify the user's problems, but also quickly test out various ideas, thus ensuring the companies do not blindly invest a lot of time and money into engineering a solution or product.

The UX Design Process

While there are multiple existing workflows or flavors for approaching a problem as a UX Designer, they all follow a similar process as outlined in the video by inVision below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um3BhY0oS2cwww.youtube.com

Credit: inVision

This video demonstrates that the UX process is heavily focused on empathizing and solving the user's problems. The roots of this actually lie in a framework known as "Design Thinking".

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a 5-stage problem solving framework which shifts the designers view from solving business problems to identifying and understanding real user problems and designing solutions for them.

The Design Thinking Framework

As you will notice from the image above, it is pretty similar to UX process. In the video below Dee Scarano of AJ&Smart discusses why design thinking is important for a business and how it compares to other design workflows and why each is important to use.

Why is it important to study Design Thinking in UX Design?

In short, the roots of UX design lie in Design Thinking. So before you start creating beautiful UIs, you must get yourself familiarized and well-versed with the process of empathizing with users and designing to solve their problems.

Dive into Design Thinking

Apart from exploring our Design Thinking resources in the tabs below, you can also read this extremely exhaustive blog post by Roe Zoe which provides an in-depth overview of what Design Thinking is.

Are you new to Design Thinking?

We recommend that you read the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman which is considered as the bible of Design Thinking.

If you are looking for a free or shorter alternative, then we recommend that you read the fantastic e-book "Design Methods" book by Amy Ko.

Learn More

Now that you have an understanding of what UX design is, you are ready to explore the Design Thinking books, activities, methods, and articles we have curated together to accelerate your design workflow.

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