Friday, April 17, 2015

What're UX competencies

UX is an important step in lifting digital maturity from functioning to firmness to delight.

User-centered design or UX (User Experience) is based on a suitable standard and design principles which explain the why (the purpose of design), and rules (which explain the how). Although UX has been around for a while, it is still an emerging and developing field, many employers apparently don't understand it, and many UX professionals were not formally trained as such. UX competencies go beyond a pretty interface, it includes the following factors:


Empathy: UX is largely a user-centered design approach, "empathy" is one of the key characteristics in defining a successful UX professional. In many cases, a design was done by an expert. It sure looks good, but it just does not allow the user to achieve his or her goal effectively, efficiently and with satisfaction, to say nothing of the organization's goals.

Process fluidity: Being good at visual design is not equal to being competent in UX; being proficient in UI coding or UI prototyping is not equal to being competent in UX. To define UX in terms of usability is also limited view. UX is an iterative and fluid process to leverage human factors in decision-making or workload. It has six areas of interest--User Research, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Visual Design, and Usability Testing.

Customer satisfaction: Customer Experience covers the entire experience of the customer. UX competency refers to "the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments." if you want it to mean, or could replace it with 'Pretty pictures' - and be happy with the definition - then you're not going to get the full benefit of what true UX can bring.

UX can make a big difference in digital transformation. Organizations with UX competencies and capable of properly implementing their digital transformation, will overwhelm traditional linear organizations, because they take better advantage of the information-based externalities inaccessible to older structures, a feat that will empower them to grow shockingly faster than their linear counterparts, and then accelerate from there, the interface designers design the interface to delight customers.

It's obviously difficult to showcase UX rather than UI as you're trying to show your process rather than a finished result. It does make sense to creating case studies for past projects which includes all the scruffy work, process and decisions along the way. And UX is an important step in lifting digital maturity from functioning to firmness to delight.

2 comments:

Thanks for the article. The belief is a good UI/VD is UX. This is because the objective (UI/VD) are equated to the subjective (UX). We have seen good UX can make huge difference, e.g- Apple Products.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and knowledge on this topic. This is really helpful and informative, as this gave me more insight to create more ideas and solutions for my plan. I would love to see more updates from you.

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