What Makes a Good UX Design?

UX is quite hard to get right as UX is not the sole responsibility of the designer or a team of designers, but instead is an organization or customer’s vision. To achieve a great user experience design, define the customer (persona), the problem, and the best strategy for tackling the problem. Here is an illustration of the UX Design way to tackle the problem.

Managing the User Experience.

Testing is a good way to refine your UX design as much as good designs begin much earlier in the process. To have a good design, one needs to understand who their users are and what they need.

In other words, good design means thinking like a user and providing a clear pathway to help the user achieve their goals when interacting with the product. To properly manage the user experience, there are about 8 steps one needs to keep in mind.

Get to stakeholders and interview them to understand user behavior and constraints and identify pain points. This stage is helpful in defining the business goal of a product.
Conduct user research to identify user personas (who are the buyers) and user journeys (paths used to complete specific tasks), helping to pinpoint the features you need.
UX audit reveals any less-than-perfect aspects of the current website, app, or product that could be leading to audience drop-off.
Define requirements: what kind of project are you doing; what does it look like; and how does it support the customer and their problem?
Create a wireframe or information architecture (IA) as a skeleton for your final output and how it works.
Create the visual design, focusing on both what it looks like (UI) as well as how it works.
Prototype with an interactive simulation that allows for input from stakeholders and users. Review and refine based upon input.
Test with real users, going beyond the basic input you received with prototype users. Testing can involve many approaches including usability testing, analytics, A/B testing.

How do you Measure User Experience?

Your design process incorporates user feedback, helping you arrive at a good UX design. But ultimately you’re going to be asked to prove that. UX measurement includes three types of metrics:

Perception metrics (e.g. NPA scores)
Descriptive metrics (e.g. abandonment rates)
Outcome metrics (e.g. conversion rates, average order sizes, number of calls by reason, how often customers escalate to the call center.)

The Google HEART framework is incredibly useful to measure the quality of your user experience.