Balance between UX and Business in Singapore

Background

My major is Industrial Design, mainly making optimization on hardware product interface. When I graduated with master’s degree in the year of 2016, I plan to start my career in UX field and found a job in USER. USER is built in 2010 in Singapore with colleagues from Singapore, China, Japan, Vietnam. USER is associated with User Experience Researchers, Frontline and Media Manager. It provides one-stop service that covers User Research, Interactive and Visual design, Web and Mobile app development, and Digital Marketing. Now it has developed into a leading UX company in Asia Pacific.

Now I have worked for more than one year in USER. and have taken part in several projects. I have grown a lot from a naive student designer to a junior designer. Today I want to talk about how to make the balance between UX and Business.

In student age, our teacher assigned a lot of work to us. We don’t have the limitation, can imagine freely. I really enjoyed a lot from the process of design. It includes finding questions, searching, investigating, interviewing, drafting, polishing and presenting. Many solutions are staying in beautiful rendering or slides, only a few are made into rugh models, not to mention finished products. The key is that student’s works have little further connection with business.

While in USER, a business-driven company, as a designer, what I do every day is called project instead of homework. It means the design is valuable and will be used into business scenes, so as to bring business benefits to clients. We designers must keep this in mind every minute during the design process. The aim we seek for is how to rightly make balance between Business development and User Experience.

Dancer dances in chains, so the same with good designer designs with limitation. The limitation may include technology, needs of clients, preference of customers. When I was involving in a smart home product design and development project, I impressed technology most. After usability testing, we suggested a new interface design solution to client. While we face a lot of difficulties and challenges, mainly coming from technology. So I summarized a list of tips for you.

1.Have some knowledge of technology.

Though you are a designer, don’t need to do work on coding, it is still necessary for you to know something about how to make your effect on website or apps. For example, you design with Illustrator, you need to know what the output the developer wants, and what will he do with your output.

2.Keep communication with developer and clients.

It doesn’t mean you have finished your work until the website is launched successfully. You should be prepared for co-operating with the developer and receiving feedback from the client. Email or IM software like Skype or Wechat are good tools to keep you connected. You may need to revise and update time to time. This is normalcy. We aim to make it better and better.

3.Rank the priority of requirements.

According to the importance, we can divide these need into different levels, high, middle, low. The highest level is the most important for user experience and client business. So we should first ensure to meet the highest requirement.

4.Seek the sweet spot between business and user need.

We live in business society, we consume every day. On one hand, we need to satisfy current and potential users, on the other hand, the client needs to benefit from the sale of products. So business is of equal importance as UX. Only driven by the business, the designed product can bring user valuable experience. Without affecting UX, we need to seek for the largest improvement of business value.

These are all my opinion about business and UX, hope they can be useful for you.

read more: https://penzu.com/p/d606697d