User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

How UX Can Be Improved: 5 Simple Steps - PC Tech Magazine

For my research into creating the best user expierence for a website, I decided to dive into the many talks offered through Adobe MAX to hear from industry professionals, on how they best tackle making a good content management system.

Meet the MAX Speaker: Fergie - Adobe

I chose to watch Meet the MAX Speaker: Fergie, which goes through how expierence designer, Rebecca Ferguson, goes through her whole project process of  UX and UI design. She starts off by asking her clients what they truly want to achieve, as though they may have a website for their product, the site may not be well tailored to displaying that product and giving customers details on the product, thus hindering sales and visitors to the site. They may also suffer from a lack of brand awareness, making people more skeptical about purchasing from the site due to their lack of prior knowledge on the brand.

Rebecca explains that the best way to approach the problem is to break it down. The first and best approach would to gather information on the business, their problems with the site and their goals for the site. Creating wireframes and potential designs for the site is the next step. try to work up some potential designs and layouts based on the information you've gathered. Having the clients feedback along the way is vital also, as getting their thoughts on your mockups helps you work out what design and layout suits the client best, which helps avoid wasting the time of both the client and yourself.

Use artboards in Adobe Photoshop - Adobe

Fergie goes into later detail about how if something in a project is going poorly, when to know whether it's better to try fix the issue or begin the project from scratch. When trying to figure out what's not working, it's important to check the balance of the site, the hierachy, the flow of the information on the page, and various things along those lines are worth sitting down and spending sometime trying to solve it. Rebecca goes on to say, when you can't quite figure it out then to put the work to the side and focus on creating a new art board, to see if a whole new concept would fix your issues before deleting your previous iteration of work. She also expresses when it comes to web design accessibility and functionality are the key things, as if you don't focus on those two primary goals, your site is practically useless.

Accessibility - Essential for users, beneficial for business - Amazee Labs

Further into the talk, Rebecca goes into talking about tools you should look into getting to help with increasing user accessibility. She suggests for UK users that gov.uk and W3C are the most easily accessible documentation of standards and best practices to follow when it comes to good UX design. UX Collective is also suggested as a great site to visit to read up on articles on areas that need improving and what your site will need to be accessible to those who are differently abled.

Catagorisation is also an important step in website building, Rebecca mentions, information architecture will allow you to more easily link the information of your site together, helping you build and expand upon the areas a lot easier.

Watching this Adobe MAX talk by Rebecca Ferguson has given me a real insight into the details and process behind UX design. Gathering all these resources from her talk on how to properly pinpoint down your issues will definitely be a major help when it comes to making our websites for our Content Management Systems module. It's comforting hearing from an industry professional that even they never feel fully confident in their designs sometimes and want to start from scratch, but the persistence of trying to problem solve before mocking up a new design, is a good tip and practice for future reference. Accessibility is also a major factor when it comes to UX design, as if you don't have tools in place on your site for those who are differently abled, then you have a loss in customers and visitors to the site, as they have nothing there to help them make their way through the site.

Overall this dive into UX Design, its principles, trials, and solutions has been and will be highly beneficial, and has offered me a new perspective on how I'll look at websites, their designs, layouts, content management and more. I hope to learn more deeply about the topic and its interworkings as we move through this module, and I'm curious to see how it will change the way I view future websites I come across, and how different and streamlined future websites I make will be compared to those I made in the previous years of the course.