But here's an important point to consider: User-Experience is everything about your product/brand that a user experiences.

That might seem really obvious and not-too-insightful. Here's what I really mean by it; Your Chief Financial Officer doesn't impact UX whatsoever because customers generally has no idea what the financial status of a company is (excluding publicly traded companies, of course) and even if they do it has to be very poor for it to affect their choice to use your product.

This is what really goes into a user-experience. And it can't be done by one person, your entire team has to live and breath UX. This post isn't meant to explain UX methods, like research or testing. Instead, it's meant to discuss all of the different components of a company that affect the experience a user has with your product.

1. Customer Service

How many times have you signed up for a cable or internet package due to the features and price advertised, and then cancelled it due to shitty customer service? If companies spent half of the time they invest in market research and advertising and reallocate it towards better hiring, training and support policies, they would retain more of their clients.

Everyone on your support team personifies your brand. If the customer has a problem, emails Mary and she is pleasant, helpful and goes that little extra step further in making his life better, all of a sudden the entire company is now viewed in the same light. Conversely, if she is dismissive, unpleasant or simply unhelpful, your customer's entire experience using your product is now tainted.

How to make it better

Firstly, take on only the amount of customers you can realistically support. There's a reason restaurants only have so many chairs. Because if the house if full, they know they need a certain amount of waitstaff who can adequately serve them. If you have more people who need your staffs time than they can properly support, you're either not charging enough or something is seriously wrong with your product.

Secondly, only take on exceptional support staff. Rigorously interview applicants, and fire them the second you think they're damaging your brand. There are certain people that just have it, and others who don't. It's better as an owner to handle customer support yourself until you can hire the right person for the job. Some brands become synonymous with great customer service and it becomes the hallmark of their brand (WestJet, Zappos). 

On the other hand, one of the worst experiences I've ever had was with Dropbox and despite their otherwise great product and marketing, it made me hate them forever and switch to a competitor. 

2. Design

This is what most people think of when they think "user experience". And yes, the design is incredibly important, but remember that it's not just aesthetics alone. Design is also how something works and flows, and generally, how well thought-out it is. Typography, for example, should be beautiful, but also easily read. Images should be beautiful, but they should also load fast.

UX design is all about testing and iterating. The only way to make sure your product is well-designed in every way is to build something simple, watch people use it, record the findings and design solutions to the problems. And then to do that again with a better product. Rinse and repeat.

But isn't user-testing time consuming and expensive? Yes and sometimes. So is buying a house, but people do it. If it was just one of those nice-to-haves, there wouldn't be much of a reason to do it, but when your entire business is at stake, it's better to take that extra time and money to make sure people actually enjoy what you're building. 

Asking for feedback from beta users is good, but it's not the same as in-person user-testing. Sending out customer surveys is probably good too, but it won't tell you how or why someone is incorrectly understanding your interface. The only way is to sit a stranger in a room—yes, a stranger. Friends, families and colleagues don't count, and ideally one who fits your target market—and watch her use your interface, and then ask her why she made the choices she did.

3. Branding

Your brand is how people think and feel about your company when they see it. More importantly, it's how people feel about themselves when they're with their brand. How could branding not influence UX? A great experience will fuel a brand, and a great brand will get the user there - and keep him - in the first place.

Apple is the quintessential example of creating products that make people feel cooler about themselves. Suddenly having a Mac or iPod (I'm going way back here), means that I'm a smart, urban professional with a scarf and skinny jeans, even if I'm a pudgy nerd. 

How to make it better

Few of us have the marketing budget that companies like Apple and Nike do. So for most of us, we'll have to apply all of the other points in this post to make any dent in our brand or UX. Having a short, memorable name, professional logo and a slick home page helps though.

4. Price

All of the items on this list have some association or correlation with each other. Consider how what you charge impacts the experience people have with your company. 

For example, if you charge more than competitors in your market, you will be perceived as higher-end and offering more than everyone else. The downside of this is that you'll be scrutinized more closely if you fail to live up to your pricing. You'll also naturally have fewer customers, but the ones you have will happily pay more to get more. 

Customers think very differently of Versace or Armani than they do of Target or H&M for clothing, and this changes how they experience your product. I suspect that many fashion amateurs (myself included) would scarcely be able to tell the difference between a pair of jeans from Bluenotes and a pair of $3,000 jeans made by Gucci. But as soon as they know how much the Gucci's costs they suddenly become OHMYGOD THE BEST JEANS EVER.

How to make it better

Charge based on the value your provide, and as much as the market is willing to pay. I suggest veering on the side of too expensive because you'll know quickly if you can't get any customers and can lower the price accordingly. On the other hand, starting as the cheap alternative only weakens your brand and tells users to expect less from you. Or you may get too many customers and then be faced with problem #1 - more customers than you can handle.

5. Simplicity/Ease

If a user has to pick between feature rich and complicated versus simple and easy, they will go with the latter, hands down, every time. And yet cutting features is so hard for entrepreneurs to do because we want to out-feature the competition, handing their ass to them with Flickr, Salesforce AND Google Plus integration (I'm not sure how that would work in practice).

How to make it better

See points #1 and #2. Talk to customers and test new features and designs to see what people actually want. Veer on the side of simpler if you have to choose. See this great post from the founder of Wesabe about why he lost to competing company, Mint. It's from 2010 but the lessons contained are timeless. In particular, this quote: 

A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment.  Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that.  If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.

Notice the words "make users happy with your product as quickly as you can". You will never have 90 days or a year to give your users that "aha" moment. It has to deliver value immediately after the on boarding process or they just won't come back. I know this first hand, as my product, Pitch Perfect suffered from this early on and we are only in the process now of turning it around. As it turns out, adding powerful customization options almost always complicates a product, and leaning towards simplicity, ease and value is always better.

6. Features/Functionality

This is rightly related to #5, but on the opposite side of the spectrum. While it's never a good idea to compete based on features, your user still needs to experience something that is different or better than what they currently use, otherwise why bother?

How to make it better

Think about the top 3 pain points your target market experiences (Make it only 1 if you can). Then think about the 3 features your product solves, and emphasize the benefit rather than just describing what it does or how it works.

For example, I love the headline on KISSMetrics' website: 

"Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it."

KISSMetrics accomplishes so much with this line without ever resorting to cliched salesman speak: "With our patented formula, we break down data into distinct indexes and..." none of that shit.

The headline line is great because it says:

1. They're an analytics company
2. They're kind of like Google Analytics
3. But they're better for people who need data about the individuals who use the customers websites.

They follow it up with this line: "Finally, you'll know who your most valuable customers are and how to get more of them." Again, this illustrates the value of why their product is great without any sort of feature list.

I realize my examples were more about marketing than product development, but they were meant to show you how companies that focus on building the most feature-packed products usually fail. A big part of UX is about learning from real users which features people truly care about, and then focusing excruciatingly on making those features awesome instead of throwing more at the wall to see what sticks.

7. Speed

Something rarely considered when talking about UX is performance. Some of the biggest online brands in the world, Google, Amazon and Facebook all emphasize speed and performance. If you have the interest, there's a fantastic post explaining how much effort Facebook puts into their performance, and all of the open-source tools they've built to make their social network fast and zippy.

How to make it better

First of all, consider the visual design of your site. Are there unnecessary bells and whistles going on that don't serve the content and only slow down the site? Installing a tool like YSlow can help diagnose the speed problem and collaborating with your designers and engineers will help correct the issue. For example, it could be an inefficient peice of code your developer wrote that's making unnecessary database queries. Maybe dynamically caching pages could help improve things. There could be a variety of technical ways to make the site faster. There are also enterprise-level services like RUM Analytics that can help improve the speed of websites and apps.

8. Copywriting

If you run an online company, it's very likely your customers will never hear your voice. And yet 90% of what they'll be doing when engaged with your product is looking at words on a page. Investing time and effort into copywriting is worth it, because it's what will give your brand a voice.

Groupon and Mailchimp are two good examples of how playful 'in-app' copy goes a long way towards making your brand feel friendly and helpful.

Notice I say 'in-app', because the tone of your copy can vary slightly between leads and customers. Do you talk to leads differently than a customer you've had for 5 years? Of course you do. When you are trying to get interest and convert a visitor on a landing page it's all about getting the users attention and clearly articulating what you do very quickly. Being overly clever and cute doesn't work as well as just being straight-forward about what you do.

But after a user is engaged with your product you can get away with a little bit more tongue-in-cheek humour, as Mailchimp exemplifies. A client you've had for 5 years can be spoken to like a trusted partner or even a friend, whereas that may be out-of-place if you're talking to a lead who barely knows you.

Hopefully this post helps break down all the various components of UX and why careful attention to each contributes to the bigger whole. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below.

• find a budget to re-design the website
• put out an RFP
• hire the right company for the job
• Work with said company and launch the site
• Ignore the relaunched website for another 3-5 years until they get another budget to re-design.

Sadly, this is the way economics work for these organizations. 

But there's a better way.

Instead of blowing your entire budget on just the website relaunch, spend 50% of it. Then spread the other 50% evenly across the next 3 years so that by the time the 3 years are up, your website isn't in too bad shape.

This leaves many website owners left wondering: What the heck do I do after the website is launched? Here's a check list:

Measure

There's a ton of stuff you can be measuring every day or every week. Google Analytics contains a wealth of information about your website traffic. Don't just focus on traffic alone, although this is an indicator of how your website is performing. Look at where your visitors are coming from; Is it mostly local traffic or are you getting a lot of national or international visitors? Go deeper down the rabbit hole, how are these non-local visitors finding our about you?

Usage

What browsers and devices they are using? If 60% of your visitors use a particular browser or mobile device, test your website on it and see what how it performs. If it's not great, then that's where you could be spending some money in optimizing for your current visitors.

Conversion

Conversion rate is always a big indicator of how your site is performing. Do 3% of your visitors complete the desired action (i.e.: fill out a contact form, download a file, complete a transaction etc.)? How could you bump that to 4%, 5%, 10%? Maybe you could try some A/B testing to see if a different headline or image would increase conversion.

Traffic Sources

How do people find out about your site? Are they clicking from a referring website, or inputting the URL directly in their address bar? Are they finding you through search engines? If so, which one and what keywords are they using? By getting more quality websites to link to yours it will increase your ranking in search engines, and learning which keywords visitors used to find you and what page they landed on from Google will give you a lot of indication as to which pages your should be further optimizing.

Content Strategy

Content should be a part of your daily life, or at least weekly. Creating quality content for your site, optimizing the pages it sits on, and then promoting the content will all holistically come together to improve your user-experience, search engine rankings and ultimately your business goals.

Social

You can monitor your website and brand on social websites by using tools like AddThis or Hootsuite which tell you how/where/what pages people shared on social media.

User-Testing

Keep testing your website with real users, either conducting tests in-house with paid users or with a tool like User-Testing.com . Is there an aspect of your website that's confusing? Are certain goals not being met? Or has a new technology come out that can improve one of your key performance indicators? 

The point of all this is, don't sit on your website expecting that the money you put into rebuilding it a year ago should last another 2 or 3 years. That relaunch was a starting point to learn from. Investing in a lower spend over a longer period of time will yield better results.

A good example of this is one of our clients, NCCDH. They hired us in 2011 to re-design their website and help them plan and build an online community, but they didn't stop there; They invest every month in monitoring their website, allowing us to come up with better ways to solve their problems and make the site that much better. Of course, a company doesn't need to invest their spend in outside firms - if they have the budget to hire internally then great. Having an in-house resource can be very helpful, but either way the point is to keep doing something.

Having solid metrics and tangible, measurable improvement surely helps in getting that extra funding in another 5 years.

Amy was our first non-geek hire at Headspace, taking the account director role back in the spring of 2010. She helped get our client-services side up-to-snuff providing project and account management services for our clients. In addition to her outstanding copywriting and research skills, we'll miss her biting sarcasm and sense of humour. We wish Amy the best of luck in her new position!

Below are some random musings from our team on their favourite Amy memories, or amories. Note: Finding ones I can actually publish was difficult, so they are kept intentionally vague.

"her encounter with 'no pants man' and other street life of Alderney"

Nick

 

"that she outranked me for filthiest mind in the office (and apparently won that coveted prize in school)"

Kyle

 

"Her use of the office champagne room"

Brian

 

"When she called everyone 'dog faces'"

Sarah

 

"the dirty looks and derision during production meetings"

Gazheek

 

"Dr. Balls"

Ricky

 

"rocking out to 90s tunes and making ourselves hungry looking through Pinterest recipes on a daily basis"

Ashley

The following post is guest content provided by the team at Software Advice, who hosted a recent discussion with Lean Analytics author Alistair Croll at SXSW in Austin. 

When launching a new company or marketing campaign, your major concern shouldn't bewhether or not you can execute on the plan. It should be whether the idea is worth investing in at all.

This was the major theme behind a discussion my company hosted recently with “Lean Analytics” author Alistair Croll. He suggests that instead of believing the mantra “if you build it, they will come,” companies should instead say, “if they would come, you should build it.” Fortunately, today we have access to enormous amounts of behavioral data that can answer this latter assertion. I regularly review and write about technology that analyzes such data from social media, so I wanted to know more about strategizing around such insights.

We shot the video during this year's SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Croll was in town leading a workshop called “Advanced Social Media Monitoring.” We discussed how companies can use data to test the riskiest parts of their business or marketing campaign idea first. Then once they learn what the market responds to (and what moves the needle on revenue, site traffic, clicks or another important performance metric), you can invest in fully building out the concept.

He gave the example of the vacation rental site AirBnB.com. The company wanted to grow revenue, which meant they needed more rental listings and more people renting. The CEO had a hypothesis that people would be more inclined to rent if properties had better images. Homeowners would also be happier to do business with them if their homes rented faster because of the improved images.

Instead of hiring an army of photographers and building out new website features for the idea, the company just made it look like they offered this service. They signed a contract with a photographer for a few properties, then posted those images. What they found was the properties with the nicer images rented two or three times faster than comparable rentals. So the theory panned out in revenue, and they fully built out the service.

This was just one example Alistair gave during the interview. To learn more about using this concept, also dubbed “The Lean Startup Movement,” check out our video interview above. 

Now, I recognize that some developers just have the gift to create mind-bending technology and usually end up being employed by Google, Facebook or Apple. No matter how good I think I am at something, I will always find others who are better, who just have "it". So my list is not taking into account technical genius, but rather qualities that any working professional can work towards improving.

So without further ado, here is my list of eight qualities I look for in a developer:

1. Be creative

Many people think developers are a nerdy bunch whose idea of creativity is making clever Star Wars puns in place of lorum ipsum text when they are adding placeholder copy to a website. However, what few realize is that great developers are as creative as interface designers, just in different ways. Some developers at Headspace have side hobbies that include playing lead guitar in a metal band, gourmet cooking, and building robots just because, robots.

And while a good developer can grab some sample code from the internet and tweak it until it works, great developers can perform the coding equivalent of bending spoons with their mind or dodging bullets Matrix-style. They understand the inner workings of computers, servers and how browsers interpret code and they can think outside the box to create elegant code that non-coders just chalk up to plain space magic.

Tell me that's not creative.

2. Be adaptable

Let me make this clear: Process is a good thing and good coders follow a process to make their code the best it can be. This may include solid database architecture or well thought-out use-case diagrams. They use test-driven development to ensure small parts of an application are working and vetted before moving on.

But at some point, a great developer knows when to bend the process to just get the job done, not allowing themselves to be tied down by a process that isn't working in a given situation.

The other way a great developer can be adaptable is to not be tied too closely to one platform. Take our team member Jonathan, for instance, who is the lead developer on Pitch Perfect. He came on board with us with a masterful understanding of PHP and Javascript along with several other languages. But he hadn't used CodeIgniter before, which is the framework we build our PHP applications with. After getting an overview from Nick and taking some time to review the code that was already built with the framework, he was off to the races, building some pretty intense shit.

Great developers have their favourite tools but are not bound to them and can MacGyver a solution when they need to.

3. Be Professional

There are a lot of ways developers can be professional. Obviously, good communication and team skills are important, but even mediocre developers should have those. Using industry standard tools is also important, especially relating to version control and offsite backup so that your code is never at risk of being lost.

Another way to be professional is to utilize best practices and make sure that solutions are crafted in a way that is extensible. Great developers refuse to hack together solutions or cut corners just to get the job done, unless they're building a prototype that is meant to be discarded. Just because the average Joe can't tell the code was hacked doesn't mean that it should be. It's got to be as clean and polished under the hood as it is on the surface, otherwise you're building a low quality product that's difficult to maintain and could have peformace issues down the road.

4. Know the business and the user

A great developer will not just code what she's told by the user-experience designer, client, or product manager without understanding the business problem it's solving. When a developer understands the business case for an application, why it will make a user's life better, then she will be that much more passionate about coding the product and will come up with more creative solutions based on this understanding.

This is kind of like how designers should actually read the copy they're given before coming up with layout or typographic solutions. Getting the context of a situation and understanding why it's valuable instead of just filling out an order in a function spec is what separates good developers from great ones. 

5. Respect and understand visual design

Similar to point #4, good developers will code the application so it works and then pass off the view to a designer or front-end developer to "make it pretty". Great developers understand that the visual structure and presentation of a website or application can make or break the success of it. In a lot of cases, it's the only thing users notice. Users expect that it will work without bugs and do what it's supposed to, but what stands out is how the product looks and feels while they're using it, and whether or not it's easy to use.

Great developers don't have to be designers or even front-end developers, but they should know when something is well designed and when it's not, and they wouldn't be content to launch an application when they see clear design or usability flaws. I think it's important for coders to keep up-to-date on user-experience which takes into account information architecture, usability, graphic design, branding and copywriting.

6. Don't stay still

Good developers find what works for them and then never move on. Great developers are constantly trying to find a better way of doing something. They are unsatisfied with the code they wrote a year ago because there's a better way of doing it now.

They also regularly read blogs that discuss new techniques and ways of doing things. They keep an eye on new tools and technology that make their code better. They even contribute some of their own findings to an open-source community. The point is, stay curious. Keep honing your craft.

7. Test your work

It's a personal pet peeve of mine when a developer tells me that he's fixed a bug or completed a task, but when I check, it's not even close to done or it generates PHP or database errors. That tells me that the developer just saved their change and then sent me an email without bothering to load it in a browser first and check it himself. In fairness, sometimes a developer may have checked it themselves in a browser first, and then when I test it there's an error that he couldn't possibly have detected due to browser caching issues or the like.

But great developers don't rely completely on QA testers. They do their best to minimize dumb mistakes like misspelled variable names that could have easily been detected by doing a quick check themselves before running it through the QA process and needing a support ticket to correct what should have been fixed before it was even committed.

8. Be lazy in a good way

This idea came from Nick, our technology director. He explained that it's better for a developer to be lazy and smart than to be ambitious and stupid. What he meant was, developers who are too eager to jump in and tackle coding a solution without first stepping back and thinking about it can find themselves painted into a corner. They write too much code, which is difficult to maintain, and it's not abstracted enough, so it contains too many dependancies that can cripple an application with bugs.

Instead, great developers are always finding a way to make themselves redundant. In other words, they want to write as little code as possible and they want to automate nearly everything. They would rather spend time writing an elegant class that automates 90% of their work intead of poring through countless templates and hard-coding a solution that will be difficult to change later on or that is just plain boring and labour-intensive.

These are all my own personal opinions based on ten years working with developers. Do you disagree with any of my points? Do you think I missed any important ones? Let me know in the comments below.

There is nothing - NOTHING - more uncomfortable to discuss than money, and even more so when you're in the depths of a project, or almost finished, and you have to go back to the client to let them know you'll need additional budget to finish the job.

So many factors can cause a project to go over budget - scope creep, additional feature or functionality requests, a full moon. Sometimes it's completely unavoidable. But it's still never a fun topic to bring up to any client.

Every agency has a different approach when it comes to billing. Some lowball their initial estimate to get clients in the door and then issue addendums aplenty during the process. Some mark up estimates like crazy, adding contingency buffers like they're going out of style, then looking like heroes when they magically end up coming in under budget. We strive to make our estimates as accurate as we can while accounting for a few bumps along the way.

We like surprises. Sometimes. Surprises are good when they come in little blue boxes. Surprises aren't good when your account person calls to let you know you're going to need to fork over $10,000 more to finish a job you thought was already bought and paid for.

How do we keep our surprises to a minimum? 

Review the project over the phone.

Email is great for following up phone conversations for posterity but there are things that can easily get lost or misinterpreted through emails. During a phone conversation with a client, it's a lot easier to jump in when they allude to this form or that button and clarify how exactly they envision it working. 

Involve the whole team.

On complex projects, it makes sense to get everyone together for 20 minutes and run through the functionality to confirm exactly how much time they'll need to spend. Even if you end up burning an hour or more of billable time upfront, it's way better than many wasted hours down the line. 

Provide a functions spec document.

Clients can review this and see exactly how their site or app will work, so there's no, "Oh, I thought this was all going to be animated!" when you provide them with a static design. No surprises. 

Add an hourly clause where appropriate.

Sometimes "little jobs" turn out to be the biggest jobs. Making upgrades on an existing website, for example, can end up taking more time than just creating a new design from scratch, with rounds of feedback and "actually, we liked it better the way it was before". So often, for these "little jobs" we'll provide a quote with the stipulation that we'll be billing to actual. Sometimes we end up spending less time than estimated, which is terrific. Sometimes it takes longer, which is less terrific for our clients, but at least they know what to expect. It helps to alert clients when your project is down to, say, 10-15% of the budgeted hours remaining, not when you're already over budget and the project is at a critical point.

Measure twice, cut once!

We always like to ask clients to put a face on their brand, a personality. We ask them things like:

• If your brand were writing a profile for a dating website, what would he/she say about themselves?
• What kind of car do they drive?
• What's their favourite outfit?
• Where do they like to go for dinner?
• What do they do on the weekend? 

Putting a face on your brand - not your customers or your target market, but your actual brand - is an interesting exercise. So often, clients will say that their brand is cool, casual, friendly, and approachable. And then we look at their current website, advertising materials, and collateral they've been using, and often discover that it's none of those things. 

No problem. We're doing a redesign, after all, so this is a perfect opportunity to make things align.

But it's an interesting question to ask yourself from time to time and make sure your website, your marketing materials, and your messaging are all in line.

What would your brand wear, eat, drive? What kind of person would they be?

Now take a look at your site, your social media presence, your marketing materials. Do they do a good job of reflecting those attributes? If someone who's never seen your site before arrived there right now, would they describe you the same way you describe yourself? If not, it might be time to consider a refresh. 

This isn't a shocker. I don't think too many clients are on the hunt for "messy and cluttered".

But interestingly, during the design process, what starts off as "clean and simple" can quickly veer into cluttered territory - and it can be hard to pull a site back from the precipice of disaster once that line has been crossed.

Clean and simple does not mean easy. In fact, a truly clean design can be the hardest kind to maintain. It's like buying white furniture. That white couch looks gorgeous in the showroom, doesn't it? Bring it home to your kids and your dog and your coffee-drinking self, and before you know it, it's unrecognizable.

So, you're getting ready to build a website. You have a ton of information to share but you really want it to be clean and simple. How do you do both? A good web design and development studio will be able to suggest some solutions for you, but here are a couple of ideas:

1. How will your content be delivered?

There are alternatives to pages and pages of text. Infographics can communicate a ton of information in an aesthetically pleasing, concise, and interesting way. Videos might be appropriate. Think not only about what you want to say, but how your audience will be most receptive to your information. Having a proper content strategy in place is key.

2. Bring three examples of designs you really like.

People like to say "clean and simple", but what they really mean is "I want a white background and I don't like bright colours". It's absolutely possible to have a website with a white background and no colour to speak of that's still not clean and simple. Having some specific examples of what you like - and being able to explain what you love about them - will help your designer to discern exactly what you mean by clean and simple (or whatever words you use to describe the style you like.)

3. Don't share everything up front.

The challenge of keeping a clean design pristine and neat is prioritizing content. There are so many important key messages, so much information we want to share up front. Right off the bat, many a crisp design is doomed. We need to get over the idea that users want to see every single important message on the homepage. Leave something to the imagination. If clean and simple are truly the things you're striving for, you really need to prioritize what absolutely must go on the front page, then trust your UX team to create the rest of the site in a way that's intuitive, drawing visitors in to read more and learn more.

If someone gives you a wrapped present, do you throw it away because you don't know what's inside the box? Absolutely not - you can't wait to see what's inside.

4. Resist the urge to add "one more thing".

You know how when you're getting ready to leave the office at the end of the day you decide to do "just one more thing" because it'll only take five minutes? And it snowballs into one more little thing, and one more, and one more, and before you know it it's two hours later, dark outside, and you're the only one still at work? Adding one more thing to a design can throw it completely out of whack or start the snowball effect of many little things, and before you know it, your clean design is completely mangled.

Coco Chanel, arguably one of the most fashionable women of all time, recommended that a woman should remove one accessory before leaving the house to avoid overdoing it on the baubles. Less is always more - the same goes for websites. 0

User Experience Design is not web design or usability. It's not information architecture, nor is it business and content strategy…it's all of those things combined. UX takes into account a user's total experience when they interact with your product or brand. 

It is not strictly tied to websites - it could also apply to a storefront or exhibition. However, it's most commonly linked with interacting with digital experiences. There are several sub-disciplines of UX, basically split into two main categories: UX Strategy and UX Design.

Image Credit: Taken from Killer UX Design by Sitepoint

Questions we ask

UX Strategy is all about the very high-level aspects of a project. It asks questions like:

• What are the business goals of this product?
• Is it a sound business model? Is it technically and practically feasible, and is there a market need?
• Who are the end users? 
• What do they want and how will this product make their life easier?

UX Research and Strategy

UX Strategists will research the project by talking to existing and potential users, either in focus group settings, individually, or in usability tests. They may also interview various stakeholders in your organization to understand everyone's viewpoint and to see where it matches up and where it diverges.

The UX Strategy may also involve creating user personas, creating fake "profiles" for three or four different typical users, giving each a name, gender, pictures and a complete story about who they are, what they are like and what they need out of the product. This is a great way to think of your users as real people interacting with their product.

UX Design

At some point, and that point is not completely clear and defined, UX Strategy turns into UX Design. This is where a variety of disciplines converge, such as information architecture, graphic design and branding, web and interaction design, content strategy and user testing.

Information Architecture with wireframes and prototypes

Information Architecture is all about organizing and structuring data on a page and throughout an application. The deliverables usually include things like flow charts, sitemaps and wireframes. The best products start out on paper and whiteboard, and UX designers are most free when drawing on graph paper with a Sharpie pen. This is the best way to get ideas and layouts out of our head and in the real world.

Paper prototypes are great because they are quick to produce, edit, or throw out, but they can easily show a client or team how the product should work. No product will ever work in code if it can't work on paper first, and the cost to produce a working product increases dramatically when there is no blueprint on paper that hasn't been fully reviewed and tested first.

Movie Making as an analogy

Think of it like producing a movie. What director will begin shooting any film without pre-production? It always starts as a script, and then as a storyboard before any actors are cast, costumes and sets produced, staged or lit. It's like that with web application - the script and storyboard has to be sound before anything is produced. The only difference is that the storyboard (wireframes/sketches) are begun before the script (function specifications).

Once the basic wireframe sketches are sound and reviewed by the team, it is important to test it with real users. This is best accomplished with a prototype. Back to the movie analogy, directors in recent years have begun using Previsualization, or Previz, especially for big budget action shots. Previs is a very simple and somewhat ugly computer generated scene using simple shapes and basic lighting that shows a complete action sequence. It allows the director and director of photography to play around with camera angles and cuts with ease to pre visualize sequence before actors and digital effects are engaged for the real thing. It's essentially a prototype of a sequence that can be done quickly and cheaply to see if a scene is going to work visually before committing to spending the resources on it.

In a similar way, prototypes are great ways to quickly assemble a simple application that will look close to the real thing, but is essentially stuck together with duct tape and bubble gum on the backend. It is made to be destroyed later. However, you can't get to the real thing without testing a prototype.

As an aside, I have been experimenting with different methods of prototypes for the past year and haven't yet found the catch-all solution. Depending on the complexity of the application, a variety of methods work. In my opinion they are either graphical prototypes or HTML prototypes. The first kind involves designing what the application looks like in a program like Fireworks and exporting flat jpegs of each view, and then assembling them into a tool like Invision where buttons can be linked to other views so the user feels like they are clicking through and using the application.

HTML prototypes are where each design view is an HTML file and actually assembled with forms, buttons, links, and layouts. The only difference is that they are static files with no "back-end" - no database, the application isn't yet built, but the front-end views are constructed so users can click through them and get a sense for how the application flows. I have found on a recent project that using JQuery Mobile is a great tool for quickly assembling slick looking prototypes with little effort - the only key is to not let JQuery Mobile dictate the design of your application and just use it as a high-fidelity wireframe.

Content, flow and those little touches

Back to the original topic: UX Designers give thought to the flow of an application, the visual layout and functionality, and even the small details and surprises that add to the experience. UX Designers may not be writers themselves but will give thought to how to use copy as a way to delight a user, or they may plan how content should be produced and organized on the site.

At this point, a UX designer may engage a graphic/web designer to produce the finalized, polished interface, or if he/she is inclined, will finish it themselves. The key for the UX designer is to conceptualize, sketch, design and test all solutions to make sure they delight users, are technically feasible, and make the product that much more remarkable.

In a nutshell

Hopefully that description helps you understand more about what UX is and why it's essential for every modern web or mobile product you build. The web is constantly evolving and as the complexity of applications increase, and the competitive nature of apps continues, it's imperative to have one or more team members who understand all or some of the concepts of User Experience. Your users will thank you, usually by giving you their money.