Design is everywhere: What Qualifies as UX in Tech Startup?

Design is everywhere: This article is dedicated to the brilliant area of user experiences and software design. We normally talk about design in the fashion industry, but I’d like to focus this post on software design as a startup and new business venture in the early stages. As with most articles, you’ll notice that we focus on iterative developments to get the best customer feedback and rework. The ultimate aim of software development is to provide software that works and solves the user’s issues. In this discussion, we focus on key areas of user experience and design covering usage, customer experience and feedback.

Most of the new tech in UX or frontend appears to focus on holding on to a customer’s attention. For content-based sites, we hear about Click Through Rates, Bounce rates, etc which defines the amount of time spent by someone on your site.

In most cases, particularly for websites or blogs, these define the amount of interaction a customer has on the website. This information is extremely crucial for an e-commerce site on which a huge amount of research has gone into.

To know more about these, I would recommend going through the Google Digital Marketing Fundamentals.

As for this post, I will now come back to the scope of what all a UX has to consider during product development.

What is UX in software Development?

This section talks about the most important aspects of software design for product development. Although UX and UI appear to do with the structure and psychology of how a user is expected to use your system – you’ll need to focus on other aspects. This ties in closely with the theme of this article – design is everywhere.

Based on that, we explore the following areas which contribute to User Experience

• Look and Feel
• Appearance and Navigation
• Accessibility
• Performance and Speed

Most importantly, I’d like to highlight that the ultimate definition of UX or UI is when a user makes use of the system. In any agile development process, a design takes multiple stages of feedback and rework before it is finally qualified as a system in use.

Additional reading material: UX design principles

Look and Feel

So, as a development house, what should we classify as a design? Should we look at the use of colours, fonts, the position of icons etc? Most times, I can recollect arguments as to why these need to be with a business analysis team?

Each organisation is extremely different. It is wrong for someone to claim universally which segment this falls under. But equally the customer psychology is an extremely important aspect. Or else, if your product is not fulfiling the needs of a customer, it’s really headed into a nosedive!

Navigation and User Interface

If I then move to navigation and how it works – we recently talked about inspiration from Steve Jobs. It certainly transcends a bit more from a mere look and feel of the product. It does bring up the question – does the product work the way it is expected?

This is personally why we need to spend the justified time in MVP and prototypes or else we are clearly heading in a direction of guesses.

Accessibility

This again boils down to how the product works. Is it accessible from everywhere or does it need a huge bandwidth to operate under?

Can it be made to work faster or will a customer be frustrated because the use of the software is limited?

Can it be easily accessed via a computer or iPad or tablet or any other devices a user operates?

The list of questions certainly is a long one. But we will need to be thinking of these before a product is released out for use.

Performance and Speed

Honestly, I don’t think this would be any different from the above pointer. But I would like to highlight that design is everywhere. It cannot just be limited to the website or the marketing teams.

A product or service permeates through an entire organisation. If we are limiting it to only a few sectors, we can easily confuse a customer about the message your product needs to convey.

It certainly cannot merely be about selling a product. The purpose of a product/service is to either create pleasure for the user or to resolve a pain point.

If we are not embodying the customer’s shoes at every stage of design, the approach is not inclusive enough.

We cannot breed success in silos, it needs to be far more collaborative. After all, design is everywhere – not just in some silos of use.

“Design is everywhere. From the dress you’re wearing to the smartphone you’re holding, it’s design.”