5 myths about UX design

No matter how long the term User Experience design ( UX design) has been hanging around web development forums, these mysterious words still remain misunderstood. And, as it happens whenever something that we can’t understand appears, prejudges are set and people start to think about it.

That’s why suddenly this productive kind of design started to look whether as sort kind of holy grail of customer-centric online services or  as the stubborn idea of some designers that are disproportionately obsessed with clients’ needs. 

Although both options might be extremist points of view, there’s still some truth if we considerer that, in fact, companies that are focused on customer experience are increasingly betting in UX and that designers that work with UX really--really-- care about users.

In order to bring a little bit of light to the case, we have to explain that UX design is not more than, according to Nielson Norman Group:

‘encompassing all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.’

This means, for web developers, to ensure that everything inside of a website corresponds completely with customer behaviors.

And now, starting from that definition, we are going to clarify some of the most common myths about UX design that are circulating on the internet. 

1.     UX designers are the same that graphic designers

This is an interesting myth that bothers both graphic designers and UXers that perform only researching or planning activities.

 The fact is that although many UX designers have the word “design” repeated in their LinkedIn profiles, much of their work is not completely connected with graphic stuff, and that’s because—this might surprise you--, UX is not only a visual thing.

Conversely, UX design counts not only graphics, images and aesthetics, but also everything related with the customer behavior in front of a product, service or platform. 

UX designers do deep researches to discover what people need and how they can solve those necessities and desires, in order to plan a product or service that matches perfectly with those demands.

That’s why in UX designing teams there are not only graphic specialists, but also professionals that play researching, planning, testing and content generating roles, and are responsible to understand customer needs and desires to help visual workers develop more productive layouts. 

2.     UX design is just a trending topic

Miscomprehension has led people to believe that UX is not more than just a crazy stream that appear from nowhere and, as fast as it came, it is going to be vanished soon.

However, the reality is that UX has been evolving since first theoretical approaches came to light and now more specific specialties such as content marketing, human-centered design and web-business analytics are getting important. 

Nielson Norman Group ‘s definition of UX design explains a reality that is not so different from the normal reality of a customer-centric company, but the big paradigmatic change is that nowadays, this customer-centricity is entirely tied with any other job description in a web design project.

Now, more and more companies are noticing the importance of this kind of design and are deciding to hire professionals skilled in this kind of designing methods. So that UX is not just a fad, it is going to define www panorama during the next years. 

3.     Popular content is enough

Some might think that user experience planning just ends when we found out the topic our customers are interested in, and that precisely the kind of mistakes that led CEOs to allow content marketing entrances with long extensions and to make investments that don’t generate ROI(http://www.investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/technical-analysis/return-investment-roi-1100).

Steve Krug, author of ‘Don’t Make Me Think’, calls the act of fast reading a text on a website “scanning” and in fact this is the kind of behaviors that people online show, so that a UX designer not only has to consider superficial things but also deep and more complex information.

UX designers not just make things be good-looking and interesting for customers and users, but digestible and easy to process, and that required lots of investigation to comprehend any aspect of your target audience.

So that, UX-friendly websites required lots of previous investigations. 

4.     UX design doesn’t need usability testing

When we make a website from scratch and take customers’ information as key factors of every step in the development of the page, we tend to believe that we just make it.

The fact is that, even when each part of the designing process is taking into account user experience, we can’t ensure that everything is correct and in the right place or that strategies were ideal, for that reason, even highly customer-centric designs needs usability testing and proving before getting online. 

5.     UX design has to be highly innovative

Another myth, and this goes hand-by-hand with other myths about design and creative disciplines, is that all UX layout or design must be super innovative, original and unique. The truth is that UX developers work to generate easy, cheap and fast solutions for business in order to satisfy customer needs, which can be naturally complex. So that, why bothering in making thinks more complicated?

So that is common to see UX-developers using—this might surprise you too—customer-proved design patterns such as Google Material Design Guidelines.

Now you know the truth

The fact is that , in summary, UX design is not a Holy Grail or a designer’s whim, but is an streaming that is aiming to redefine how companies interact with their target, so understanding it, in an appropriate and non-prejudging way  is extremely important to online projects to success. 

We recommend you to see this Ted Talk video to feel more clear about the power of UX design.