User experience design can be broken down into 4 roles: interaction design, visual design, rapid prototyping, and usability testing. A good user experience is required for a good product, thus, close collaboration with product management is essential for the user experience design.
Interaction Design
The interaction design role is dealing with the ways personas interact with the product. It focuses on user actions, responses, and feedback from users. The interaction designer’s job is to map the product requirements to a design represented by wireframes, and pass them to the visual designer.
The interaction designer’s responsibility is to develop a deep understanding of the target users and come up with task flows, navigation, and user flows that are usable and valuable.
Visual Design
The visual designer puts flesh to the wireframes and creates the actual pages and user interface look and feel. This includes everything from the layout, colors, and fonts, but most importantly, what emotion the visual design communicates and evokes in the product.
The visual design role is where the user experience overlaps with the user interface, and it’s all about making the product visually appealing to the users, which is critically important for the success of the product.
Rapid Prototyping
The rapid prototyping role is about creating models that capture the ideas of the product management and designers into a prototype that can be tested on real users, and iterated upon.
The purpose of the rapid prototyping role is to refine ideas before development begins, and ideally discard products that should not be developed in the first place. Usually, the rapid prototyper creates different prototypes for the same product, also called A/B testing.
Usability Testing
The usability testing role specializes in research and analysis of the users, evaluating whether products or prototypes allow a given user to easily achieve objectives. It means recruiting target users, administering the tests, evaluating the test results and recommending alternatives.
Usability testing is often considered a big deal and avoided, which is why so many startups fail. It’s quite easy to do the usability testing, all you need is a target user, a laptop, and patience. It’s about observing the behaviour of other people when using and looking at your prototypes, as well as competitors web sites, during the product discovery phase.
Great User Experience Design Formula
It’s normal to think that you need a big team for great user experience design, but that’s not the case. The 4 roles of user experience design can be divided among 2 people. One designer can take on the interaction design and the usability testing, and another designer can handle the visual design and rapid prototyping. Together with the product manager, it will result in a team of 3.
Another way to distribute the roles would be to leave the usability testing to the product manager and hire only one designer to handle the interaction design and the rapid prototyping alongside the visual design, or simply outsource the visual design past the product discovery phase, resulting in a team of only 2.
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