 what's up guys today's episode is super simple but sometimes some of the simplest things that are most important and it's what is a UX designer and what do they do so i'm gonna put five minutes on the clock i think it's a little bit detailed so but i'll try and grab as much information here as possible for you so UX designers work in a wide range of your companies and there's different job titles as well so i'm going to talk about UX designers specifically but there is also product designers and there's UI designers and they all focus on different parts of basically creating digital products so for a UX designer normally it's the larger companies who hire specifically UX designers and that's just because they have bigger budgets the the websites are normally not that they could be quite small but they could have a lot of designers so you can focus more on specific things and that's a good thing because it allows you to really hone in on improving things but essentially what a UX designer's job is is to improve the digital product for customers and that improves the business because you're helping people along the way and you're also increasing revenue because you're improving things like how many times they might purchase a product from you that's that's what a UX designer's job is and there are different processes that we can go about improving things so the first thing we'll talk about is the UX design process so whenever you create a digital product you want to put it through something called the UX design process and that is it's essentially a way of creating something that is what people want and it helps solve problems so there's four stages in that and a UX designer can pop in and out of different stages and sometimes at like smaller companies like startups you might work on different projects at the same time so you might be in one stage of one and another stage of another and also depending on you you might like to focus on different parts depending on your skill set and you know what that's perfectly fine we're not all sheep we're not all the same and you know I embrace who you are and let's have a look at these different stages so the first one is research so some companies don't do much research some companies do normally there's two different types of job role you'll really go into sometimes you'll be working on an existing website and sometimes you'll be creating something called the greenfield project which is a project from scratch and the different types of research really if you if you get like most of the time you probably go into a company which already has a product and the research that you'll be doing there really is talking to existing customers and it's probably better sometimes going into a company that has a product or service already in place because it's a little bit easier to talk to people who already use it the real hard work is building something from the ground up but if you first go into a company the the first thing maybe depending on what they put you on but if they're quite new to you x maybe you might have a little say in this but I'd really try and talk to some customers and you know what it could be online surveys if you don't have access to them in real life nothing's better than getting them into the office even creating a schedule so you get to get like two customers in every Friday or something try and make this a part of your routine and then you can kind of figure out what you're going to talk to them about or maybe show them new stuff but get different people in talk to them but the real point of the research phase is to understand the problem that the website's trying to solve and the UX designer needs to understand that problem so they can basically create the simplest solution for that problem that's the job of the UX designer so there's different techniques you can use like we said before the surveys this interviews there's talking the customers one-on-one but once you understand the problem you're trying to solve and also this could be looking at analytics as well which is something that a lot of people don't do but also if you've got some spare time as a designer this is actually where your value might come in so get google analytics installed make sure you get access to it and start looking at the analytics at a website and understand maybe you might identify a problem that you can solve really simply by changing a little bit of design on the website and I'd class that as part of the research phase but talking to customers identifying their problems and also identifying things in the actual problems that the website built and you'll only know that by looking at analytics so i'd say get google analytics installed maybe incorporate that like a lot of people and companies won't ask you to do this stuff but i really believe as part of the UX designer your job is to understand fully how the website works and a lot of people don't maybe don't really know that much about metrics or don't understand how powerful it is but i'd really advise you to understand how powerful metrics are and maybe take a look at them but anyway that's part of the research phase and there's lots more jobs coming available so you might not be a UX designer you might be a UX researcher and you know what it's so meaty and it's so interesting and it's something that i didn't really appreciate until later on in my career but it's something that you can definitely get stuck into and go that route maybe for larger companies with bigger budgets they might focus more on UX researchers and maybe people from oh time's done i'll have to keep going i'm gonna put another i'm gonna put another three minutes on but maybe people from a more scientific background might be interested in going into this but anyway that's the research phase and that's part of what a UX designer does then there's also the design part and that's split up into two so the first part of being a UX designer is it's kind of like low fidelity mock-ups so once you know what you what your task is to make you can then make a digital version of that so i always say it's best to sketch first because you can get through loads of ideas nine of them out of ten will probably be rubbish let's be honest i certainly happens like that for me for those ones where i choose the good one then you can work with people to make sure it solves the problem you know what you can do this you can do this on a computer if you want i certainly used to love doing stuff on the computer but then it's just quicker to do it on paper and you don't you don't need to but it's just i'm just trying to save you some time but then when you have a something that solves the problem you want and this could be a problem on your website or it could be a bigger problem and this could be the journey of how a user signs up for a website or something once you've worked through that make sure you work through that first before putting detailed designing because it's just quicker to change but once you've got something that meets the criteria that you need you can put it you can do two things you can put a wireframe together which is a basically design with no like it's just like times new roman and some squares you know there's no images or anything like that and that's basically so you can really actually think about what you're doing and don't think about design so you could go that way lots of people do that way lots of people also work for companies which have a design language and that's something like the design won't change so the buttons will be the same the fonts will be the same the colors will be the same even things down to like the images and backgrounds will be the same so you could actually it's not popular say this but you could skip that phase and actually make it in the UI language if it's easier and it's already built and it's not going to change you could actually make your page like that it's personal preference at the end of the day um but that's also the job of the UI designer so some companies have UX UI designers some companies have like UI designers the person who puts the visual detail in like I just said like the um like the design language the fonts and colors so sometimes this is one job role sometimes um so product designer could be one job role normally the smaller companies you'll do more but that's also exciting because you get to impact the business a lot more but yeah then you put it like that and then the next important thing for UX designer so once you so that's that's the design part of your job so you got your research your design and then also like just as important as the testing part and this is how you prove that the thing actually works so again customers into into the lab a few places I've worked I've been lucky where they have like an actual room setup so you can bring them in and talk to them and like um you can like record your sessions and stuff and this is normally the bigger companies where they have more budgets but it's also like such a man I'm going over time today I'm just going to stop this now I don't even know why I timed these anyway probably to make it a bit more concise so we don't go on like this but this is a super important lesson but yeah you get customers in you talk to them and you test what you're doing so part of the design phase you'll make a prototype and you can do that in Adobe XD and Figma, Sketch, InVision all these different tools make the prototype actually observe people using it because I thought I've designed something amazing for yeah we all get big headed when we design something and then to see people like using it and tearing it to shreds effectively is um is interesting and if you're humble enough you'll be able to change the design if you're quick enough you can change it and test it again with more people on the same day if you can think on your feet because you will see the same thing come up and up again and you might be like oh no one can see that button because it's blue on a blue background it'll be obvious when you see people using it you might think it looks nice but then you'll just notice people not being able to use your product so be humble accept the changes and then at the end of the day once your testing's done and that could be in person online milling different ways you'll have something that you can release and you know what it's going to perform because you know you've tested it and it's gonna you've seen people using you know it's going to perform well so there we go research design testing and then once it's done and released look at your analytics and go back into the research phase because this is the most exciting part because you can actually change like what like I said like you know we adapted on the fly one we were doing testing you can also do that when it's released if you look at the analytics and notice that 99 percent of people are bouncing on your homepage change your homepage man just like just look at your analytics this is en masse how your website's performing the scorecard and your job as a designer is to suggest the easiest things to make the biggest improvements because they're the things that are going to get done and they're the things that are going to bring you the books at the end of the day and also make your customers happy because all you're doing is looking at what how people are using it's like you know when you have a path and then you'll see a path go on the mud off to the side if that was analytics it's obvious just build another path there because then that's the route people want to take so make people happy and improve your business and improve everything else at the end of the day guys I hope you enjoyed that lesson if you want to watch more of the videos they're coming up now let me know in the comments what you think you might completely disagree but I really think it's down to personal preference like who you are as a designer like I might be more UI focused because that's where I came so maybe I might skip out wireframes and do some more stuff like that but really depends on the company I've worked in like five or six different places where they're entirely different and no one's right or wrong it's all personal preference I hope that helped UX design guys until next time keep designing and take care