4-Quadrant UX Design Model to Create a Great User Experience
“If your product can earn you billions, adding UX aspect to it will earn you five times more”
With internet evolution, ‘User Experience (UX)’ has become a buzzword of digital product development. The design concept is progressively becoming a need in modern life. Almost everyone is seen talking about the user experience due to which it has become an important aspect of online products to be successful in the market. But unfortunately, many people confuse UX with UI.
There is a crucial difference between UI and UX. UI (User Interface) is similar to the outlook or appearance of a person and UX (User Experience) is the feeling that one gets after interacting with the person. Christian Saylor has well said that “Design creates stories, and stories create memorable experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.”
What is User Experience Design?
User experience is nothing but the user’s feelings and approaches towards using a specific product. User experience (UX) design is a process of designing products that offer relevant and valid experiences to users. UX design includes designing the whole process of obtaining and incorporating the product consisting of usability, function, design and branding characteristics. In short, UX is the value that the user gets while using the product.
UX design considers every component that shapes the experience, the feeling it gives to the user, and how easy the user finds it to complete the desired tasks. This could be anything from how the product feels in the user’s hand to how easy the checkout process is. The chief objective of UX design is to craft an effective, applicable, simple and wholesome pleasant experience for users.
“UX is about empathizing with businesses thereby helping them achieve their core goal”
UX Design Quadrant Model
UX is a wide concept that can be classified into four quadrants — Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, User Research, and Information Architecture.
- Experience Strategy
Generally, it is considered that UX design is all about providing experiences to users, but in fact, it adds a great value to the business. Experience strategy is a significant UX design principle that plans a holistic business strategy as well as integrates customers’ and organizational requirements.
2. Interaction Design
Interaction design observes the user’s interaction with a system considering all interactive components like page transitions animations and buttons. Interaction design is all about creating instinctive designs that help users to perform core tasks and actions with ease.
3. User Research
UX design involves identifying a problem and crafting a solution to resolve it. This calls for extensive research and feedback from your customers. During the research phase, surveys, interviews, and usability testings are done as well as user personas are created so as to understand the end user’s goals and requirements. Qualitative and quantitative data is collected, which is used to make design decisions.
4. Information Architecture
Information architecture involves an arrangement of data and content in an accessible and meaningful way. This significantly helps users to navigate their way around the product. To decide the information architecture of any given product, the relationship between various sets of content is considered. Close attention is paid to the language used, which should be consistent and convincing.
Closing Thoughts
The four fundamental disciplines of user experience design show that UX design is much more than just sketching and wireframing. It is multidisciplinary field involving elements of computer science, cognitive science and psychology, usability engineering, communication design and much more. Thus, UX design is a process of improving user satisfaction by a product through enhancing the usability, availability, and satisfaction offered in the interaction with the product.
“Making customers happy and improving product experience will eventually result in ROI”
