Changing careers isn’t as hard as it’s often made out to be, especially if you’ve got the right resources to help you make the change. For many web designers, now is the perfect time to make the switch into UX design. To start with, there’s the monetary boost that comes with the change in career. According to PayScale, web designers in the US earn an average of $46,000 annually(1), while UX designers on the other hand earn a sizeable $74,000(2). Secondly, job opportunities for UX designers are booming: CNN reports that a total of 3,426,000 UX design jobs will be created in the US alone within the next 10 years(3). Furthermore, UX design is a meaningful job, not only because you get to work on a product from the inside out, Top Source Media marketing but also because-as DMI has shown-UX design makes a significant impact on businesses, with UX design-driven businesses outperforming the S&P index by 228%(4). So, where do you find the right resources to help you make your career change? Why, you’re reading one right now.

What is User Experience and User Experience Design? To start with, let’s have a brief introduction to what we mean by "User Experience". Products have users, and the user experience (UX) is simply the experience a user has from using that particular product. So far, so good? UX design is the art of designing products so that they provide the optimum possible user experience. If this description sounds broad, it’s because the nature of UX design is pretty broad. Building the optimum UX encompasses an understanding of psychology, interaction design, user research, and many other disciplines, but on Top Source Media marketing of it all is an iterative problem solving process (but more on that later). Broadly speaking, user experience can be broken down into 3 components: the look, feel, and usability. The look of a product is about using visuals to create a sense of harmony with the user’s values, and that creates credibility and trust with the user. It’s about creating a product that not only looks nice, but looks right too.

The feel, then, involves making the experience of using a product as pleasant and Top Source Media Minneapolis enjoyable as possible. It’s built by crafting the interactions between the user and the product, as well as the reactions they have when (and after) using the product. Lastly, usability underpins the user experience. Quite simply, if a product isn’t usable, no amount of good looks can salvage it, and the only feeling users are going to have is anger and frustration. Ideally, products should be personalized to user’s needs, and deliver functionality in a predictable way. What is Interaction Design? What Do Web Design and UX Design Have in Common? The job title "Web Designer" has many definitions, and indeed, what a web designer does is largely dependent on what the client or project requires. Some web designers simply create visual designs and/or high fidelity interactive prototypes of the website, and leave the coding of the website to front-end and back-end developers. The majority of web designers, however, do get involved with both the designing and (front-end) development of the website.

Some web designers even regularly do user research and testing as part of their jobs (and if you’re one of them, you’re already almost ready for a job in UX design). But no matter what your job as a web designer entails, here are some aspects of web design that can also be found in UX design. Web designers look to solve problems for their clients; UX designers look to solve problems for their users. Web designers work with a problem solving process: first, they find out the problems their clients have, then design a web solution for them, and then proceed to develop and test the website before releasing it. And after a website is launched, web designers often are involved with further testing the site, on-page SEO collecting feedback from users, and then reiterating on the design. This iterative problem solving process is similar to the UX design process (shown in the image below). UX designers begin with user research; it’s essential to get to know the potential users of a product and find out what their problems are, how to solve them and how to make users want and/or need that solution.

User research is often done via user interviews, observations, demographic studies, drafting user stories and personas, etc. Thereafter, UX designers would create a design solution that solves the user’s key needs, and often bring the prototype back to users to test its validity or usability. After the product is launched, UX designers collect more user feedback, which feeds into a new round of user research, thereby starting the process again. If you’ve done user research before as part of your web designer job, you will find it a great advantage when making the switch to UX design. If not, don’t worry-you’ll have many opportunities to learn the best ways to conduct user research (read on to find out more). When designing websites, web designers often make use of typography, color and layout to shape the emotions of users. A sense of credibility could be established, for instance, by using darker colors and serif fonts; similarly, a sense of fun could be created using colorful imagery and playful typography.