A UX architect, or lead UX designer, is the member of a product team who is primarily responsible for ensuring all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—including its form, behavior, and content—are learnable, usable, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. Thus, a UX architect has an important role to play from a product’s conception to its launch. But creating truly great products requires an entire product team to place the needs of users foremost when making product decisions—or even better, a user-centered corporate culture. If you find yourself in a less enlightened company or on a product team that just doesn’t get how creating great user experiences contributes to a company’s success, you should take every opportunity to evangelize the value of UX to people in your company—from the executive management team to your peers in other disciplines on product teams. If you need help making the case for UX, have a look at my article on UXmatters, “Why UX Should Matter to Software Companies.”
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What is User-Centered Design?
User Centered-Design (UCD) is a philosophy and a process. It is a philosophy that places the person (as opposed to the ‘thing’) at the center; it is a process that focuses on cognitive factors (such as perception, memory, learning, problem-solving, etc.) as they come into play during peoples’ interactions with things.
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Imagine that you’ve been bindfolded and locked insite a trunk of a car, then driven around for a while and dumped on a strange street. Could you look around the place and tell exactly where you are? If you ask your site users something like that while giving them a random link on your site, how would the answer be? Do you expect them to tell exactly where they are and what your site is about? If yes, firstly check if your have a user-friendly site by this simple but useful test.
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From UPA in the ISO 9241 standard:
Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs. There are many definitions of usability from books by usability professionals.
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User-centered design (UCD) is an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product.
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