User Experience Design (UXD or UED or XD) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product. User experience design encompasses traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design. Also, it extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users. Similarly, UX Designer (UXD or UED or XD) is the person to process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided.
Visual design
Visual design, is also commonly known as graphic design, communication design, and visual communication. It represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any user interface. Furthermore, visual design is to use visual elements like colors, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. Fundamentals of Gestalt psychology and visual perception give a cognitive perspective on how to create effective visual communication
Information architecture
Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services, supporting usability and fund ability.
In the context of information architecture, information is separate from both knowledge and data, and lies nebulously between them. It is information about objects. The objects can range from websites, to software applications, to images et al. It also has a relation with metadata: terms that we use to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, process, and organizations.
Structuring, organization, and labelling
Structuring is reducing information to its basic building units and then relating them to each other. Organization involves grouping these units in a distinctive and meaningful manner. Labeling means using appropriate wording to support easy navigation and fund ability.
Finding and managing
Fund ability is the most critical success factor for information architecture. If users are not able to find required information without browsing, searching or asking, then the fund ability of the information architecture fails. Navigation needs to be clearly conveyed to ease finding of the contents.
Interaction Design
There are many key factors to understanding interaction design and how it can enable a pleasurable end user experience. Building great user experience requires interaction design to play a pivotal role in helping define what works best for the users. High demand for improved user experiences and strong focus on the end-users have made interaction designers critical in conceptualizing design that matches user expectations and standards of the latest UI patterns and components. While working, interaction designers take several things in consideration. A few of them are:
- Creating the layout of the interface
- Defining interaction patterns best suited in the context
- Incorporating user needs collected during user research, into the designs
- Features and information that are important to the user
- Interface behavior like drag-drop, selections, and mouse over actions
- Effectively communicating strengths of the system
- Making the interface intuitive by building affordances
- Maintaining consistency throughout the system.
In the last few years, the role of interaction designer has shifted from being just focused on specifying UI components and communicating them to the engineers to a situation now where designers have more freedom to design contextual. Therefore, User Experience Design evolved into a multidisciplinary design branch that involves multiple technical aspects from motion graphics design and animation to programming.