Blogged To The Eyeballs

What is a User Experience designer?

The days of whacking a big photo of a shiny office building, smiling people and uploading bastardised jargon to convey a company as a professional outfit is becoming transparent to the ever savvier web browser. So pick up your pantyhose and let’s explore the birth of the User Experience Designer or has it been here all along!

A User Experience Designer (Wikipedia) UED’er is the guy that magically navigates you around a webpage without you knowing it, teasing you to the web pages that the web owner wants you to really be looking at. To the web browser it’s just a couple of clicks, to the user experience designer it’s months of strategic planning to deliver the right look & feel, colours, layout, navigation, technology, design & business modelling of a website to draw you in to making those essential click-clicks, and say ah! That’s what I’m been looking for, great, I love it, I‘ll buy it and tell me friends about this website. Just another day in the office for a UED’er & the circle of web-life continues.

The UED’er gels many disciplines together, some of them being:  design; branding; programming; SEO (Search Engine Optimisation); online business modelling; management; sales; marketing; customer & client nowse in order to execute milestones & quick wins to keep himself and /or the team motivated and focused to deliver a user friendly product to market & ensure ROI (Return On Investment).

We the people have spoken!

We the web browsers now want to feel something - we want the design and colours & navigation to make us feel: peaceful & Zen like; excited; wild; lustful; safe… and we want to get what we want now. If I can’t get what I want from your homepage in 3 seconds I’m off, Googling for someone else, that’s right, your competitor. We’ve become a world of click-a-holics.

Amongst an array of other key disciplines the big guns of a UID’er is his understanding of the way we interact with websites. Surfing the web to the wee hours of the morning helps but a good dollop of experience is essential. Getting stuck in and making mistakes is also key. Another essential factor to understand is the way we gather information from online reporting tools like Google Analytics. Knowing how to use these tools paves way for strategic phases of road-mapping based on results to ensure that a website is perfectly focused to a target audience in order that bounce rates are reduced and customer loyalty retained.

We get the picture!

I was enjoying my usual post dinner banter with my flat mate while quaffing an After Eight mint when an Ad popped up on my rather tasty flat screen and announced - Confused.com (poorly grained web cam-esque picture) come and see our new website, (old man) it’s easier to use, (young floppy haired spotty student dude) it’s cool, (young mum) it saves time comparing prices,... yardy yardy yardy! It left me reeling in my seat. My flat mate turned to me and nonchalantly said with a pinch of sarcasm ‘niiiicccce, isn’t that what you do bumface.’

Others are also jumping in on the action, Friends Re-United: ‘meet new friends easily with our new website’, Monster e-newsletter:

We've rebuilt Monster from the ground up—just for you. It's easier than ever to search and apply for a job, to manage your CV and explore your career possibilities. The right job is out there. And it's easier than ever to find with the new Monster.

Ok we get it, UED is becoming main stream. Just don’t spoil it!

Maverick & Ace are back

Just like our 80’s favourites Mav & Ace from TopGun, UED’ers have always been knocking around cyberspace in the form of an avid web designer, web programmer / developer who have pushed our user experience of web life testing the boundaries of acceptability. It’s now that the need for User Experience designers has become a necessity in order to gel and make sense of all the web disciplines ensuring the job is delivered with pin point accuracy to their target audience on time and on budget. The web community is becoming smarter & more sophisticated demanding an ever more user friendly approach to web design and functionality so it’s key we all start taking notice of the migration. We can either keep up or get left behind.