Master UX design: 10+1 key methods to enhance digital products

In UX competitor analysis, we examine and evaluate what works well and what doesn’t on the platforms of direct or indirect competitors of a given digital product or service. We look at UX Design Examples to understand best practices or outdated solutions that should be avoided. By understanding the competitive landscape, you can strategically position your product to outperform others in the market.

Field research involves observing user behavior and product usage in a real-world environment. To design effectively, it is essential to gain a comprehensive understanding and practical knowledge of the micro and macro environments of the target audience. This cannot be achieved from the design desk, which is why a “perspective shift” is necessary. The most effective method for this is field research, where you observe the target group in their natural environment and specific life situations, such as a user of a route planning app getting into their car, or shoppers during their store visit. This way, you can uncover aspects and unexpected details that were not previously considered. The knowledge gained through field research allows you to develop personas and examine user journeys more accurately.

Field research helps in understanding the UX Design Principles in practice.

User interviews allow us to gather more comprehensive knowledge about the persona, that is, the target group of a given product or service. These interviews are particularly useful when we want to uncover the user's habits and past experiences, as well as understand their thoughts on an ongoing or completed UI UX Design product.

The essence of UX and UI Design lies in solving real needs and experienced problems of real people, rather than addressing an abstract user imagined based on preconceptions. The goal of creating personas is to design a fictional, yet credible and lifelike character whose motivations and problems we can empathize with throughout the design process. With their help, we can keep this focus throughout the entire UX Design Process.

The user journey consists of the steps a user takes while using your product or service, along with the emotions and thoughts that guide these actions. During the user journey, we tell a story with the help of our already developed personas, which serves as a starting point for design and makes it easier for all stakeholders (designers, clients, etc.) to understand what is happening in the target group’s mind throughout the process.

Heuristic analysis is an in-depth UX research tool used to measure the usability of a digital platform. Unlike usability testing, heuristic analysis systematically examines and evaluates a website or digital product based on predefined criteria, revealing usability issues.

The design process is fundamentally influenced by the resources, deadlines, and decision-making processes of a company, which is why design discovery begins with organizational research.

In a broader sense, stakeholders are the internal and external individuals, groups, institutions, or organizations affected by the company's work, and vice versa, those who influence the company's operations. However, in a UX design project, the stakeholder is the person whose thorough understanding helps us better grasp the environment and whose work significantly impacts the project's or product's success.

One of the fundamental criteria of usability is that users can easily find what they need on the site. When organizing content, we need to design an architecture that aligns with the mental model of our users. Card sorting helps with this process, where users participating in the research use labeled cards to group the topics of a website or the functions of an application according to their own understanding.

During the various phases of website and application design, we develop our ideas through sketches, wireframes, and UI designs filled with graphic elements or content that closely resemble the final product. We test our formulated concepts through prototypes. These are interactive designs where users can directly try out different functions, allowing them to provide feedback on the final product's performance. Prototypes are also used to conduct user tests.

One of the most important measures of UX Design success is usability testing. Usability testing is similar to a mini anthropological study, where we observe the behavior of users selected from the target audience.

The essence of this method is to present two versions of a design solution on an already live and functioning website or application to users. After collecting a sufficient sample size, we use analytical methods to determine which version performs better.