Aristotle, Greek philosopher
Aristotle, Greek philosopher
There’s probably a few pre-emptive questions worth asking, to get us started, that hopefully I’ll answer as part of this series of stories:
OK, so you already probably know the answers to most of these questions, but there’s still a big portion of people out there in businesses making decisions everyday on behalf of people. Important decisions, that have large scale impacts on their workforce’s lives.
Often these people are unaware of the people they are making decisions for, their needs and the implications that their decisions have on their workforces lives. This is UX, empathising with people, understanding them and striving to make their lives better, in whatever way and however small.
As part of this series I’ll start to explore UX, everything it incorporates and touches and hopefully impart some interest (and maybe even some knowledge!) for you to continue reading. Hopefully this series of articles will help you keep the faith, learn a little, enable you to spread the good work and win some of the battles and maybe even a war or two!
I won’t attempt to answer all this now, but over the course of a few stories, I’ll try and cover a few of the sciences we draw upon in our art as a creative community to create engaging experiences.
It’s important to explore what UX was, has always been and is, 20 years on after the phrase was coined in the mid 90’s; as it makes us who we are as a design community.
We can’t go anywhere without first talking about the design that’s involved in UX. This often is the combination of weeks of effort and the expertise from all the fields of work, I will come to mention; to produce design deliverables. These design deliverables can be wide and varied and their use is just as wide ranging. But it’s not just about the design deliverables the conversations around these are more important to develop a shared understanding, bring ideas to life and win over your stakeholders.
We can use a mix of these common design deliverables, depending on the need and the team we are working with:
As I mentioned, the reasons for producing these deliverables is just as wide ranging:
Stephen Schmitz — Underneath the surface
So you can start to see UX is more than just a nice bit of UI design! There’s lot’s going on underneath the surface and behind these beautiful looking designs. As well as all this work, there’s often a lot of glue that’s being applied between different roles in the business. This can see us often supporting Agile Coaches/Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Business Analysts and User Researchers, to bring all this information together and make sense of it to produce a meaningful product as an end result.
I’m not going to bore you with any specific details of the design deliverables we produce (you probably know them better than me!). Each one is valuable in a different way, for different groups of people and at different times. The important thing is choosing the right one at the right time to tell your story in the right way for your stakeholders.
I work in a lean way; to produce the design deliverable that’s needed to foster understanding, create a common goal and produce a great end result. Sometimes that means I need to go into greater fidelity to really work out all the details. Sometimes a very high level sketch is all that’s needed; where we I lean on design systems, to do all the heavy lifting and provide the guidance on components used.
That’s probably enough for now on design deliverables. Next time out I’m going to be dipping my toe into Psychology, how this informs design and how User Experience is … Psychology.
Originally written as part of the ‘User Experience is …’ series for UX Collective.