What UX stands for?
In most domestic companies, we commonly call User Experience as "UE" for short, but for the worldwide scope, its well-accepted abbreviation is "UX";
So what's UX Stand for?
Focus on the target users of the products/services, including who they are, how they behave, what makes them use our products, even their work, life, habits, and all other factors relevant to how will they response to the products or services;
Focus on our Clients, we learn their business, process, also personas and roles in their products/services/processes;
Respect users' habits and guide users to cultivate a good habit of using the products/services;
It's not a single functional specification or a single research study, it's not a fixed process, it's a process of continually learning about users, responding to thier behaviors, and evolving the product or service.
UX is everywhere in the processes, including end-user interview, product anlysis, interaction design, UI design and UI implementation;
Simplicity is the best, make rich featured but simple user interface without distracting user's mind, we love both efficiency and effectiveness;
UX engineers are both liaisons and implementer, we know when to litsen, we know how to act, we balance the client bussiness goals and end-user requirements for the client organization;
Finally, we help our clients to build highly usable and accessible, effecient, consistent, low dev/maintenance cost products, services or processes;
UX is not only about technology, but good technologies DO help us to fulfill our goals better.
What we do in a project.
First, we keep listening, asking, analyzing and iterating, to well learn the requirements from our clients and end-users;
We help clients to get all the functionalities and workflows into shape;
We help clients to idetify the roles from their workflow and create personas;
We provide wireframes with Interaction Diagrams& Specifications;
- We try to use GUI framework and proper functional block design to keep consistency of visual style and user experience on this product,
- We use Axure/Visio/Photoshop/Illustrator to compose the prototypes, wireframes, and final visual design screens to show to all the related people and get feedbacks from them,
Clients know their business/process well, what we need to do is helping them to achieve more goals through proper interaction design and implementation solution;
We just don’t need always to do what is best for the end users, as UX engineers we have to find the sweet spot between the user's needs and the business goals, while balance business and end users;
Other than dealing with clients and end-users, UX engineers are also caught in the middle trying to speak the business language, the developer language and the UI designer language to justify why we need to do our job, how to do it, and why it's important to success.
So someone also says that UX is kind of an art of leverage and compromise:-)
UX Definition Process.
References:
http://www.blogs.com/topten/10-ux-user-experience-blogs-to-watch-in-2010/