Why Data Privacy Matters - An Inside Look
As the world becomes more digitized, billions of internet users provide personal information or sensitive data like credit card details online. Though some online businesses provide a secure channel on their websites for transactions, data privacy issues are still enormous. This is causing unprecedented privacy incidents and inconveniences.
The darker side of not handling privacy thoughtfully includes data loss, identity theft, personal information misuse, cyber threats, and significant financial losses.
The poor handling of customer information or compromise could impact a business’s reputation and how customers trust it.
Data privacy is the fundamental right of all in the digital universe. But is it of any real value to the business and the customer?
It is imperative to understand if data privacy is just a hassle or a compliance checkbox exercise that benefits a business’ reputation, customer, and the data protection agency.
What is data privacy?
Why data privacy matters?
Data is a digital asset that provides significant value for making informed decisions for a business. These decisions help mitigate risks, streamline operations, and drive quality and revenue generation.
Businesses need to be open about how they are storing, using, and protecting customer data. This transparency is also essential to business stakeholders and competitors.
Data privacy is paramount to the safety of our digital economy today because of these two reasons.
Ideological reasons – These include how data privacy perceives an idea by businesses and customers. Some of the considerations include:
- Your privacy is a right that you were not always given or exercised.
- Privacy is a fundamental human right on any real-world or digital platform.
- Having nothing to hide is a myth.
Practical reasons - These include the implementation reasons for data privacy based on its implications.
- Information in the wrong hands becomes dangerous.
- It can’t predict how non-compliance to data privacy regulations can impact the business’ future.
- Context-based privacy data compromise could become a digital weapon.
- Any sensitive information has value and is directly associated with business revenues.
Important data privacy insights
- Ponemon’s study on “The Impact of Data Breaches on Reputation and Share Value” revealed that 65 percent of customers lost trust in a company that maliciously or accidentally exposed their personal data.
- The data privacy breach incident at Home Depot in 2014 was the most massive point-of-sale heist of all time. The theft of payment card information was a clear case of data privacy compromise and exploitation by the culprits.
- Some of the recent data privacy trends that focus on the importance of its compliance include:
Three factors influencing data privacy
- Consent - This has to do with receiving the customer’s consent when data shared with third parties or other entities outside of a data privacy agreement between a business and a client.
- Notice - This includes letting the customers know about the legal collection and storage of their personal data.
- Regulatory restrictions - Remaining compliant with national and international regulations protects businesses from fines and criminal charges and their customers’ right to privacy.
There are many moving parts regarding data privacy, making it imperative to design a website based on the direct approach. Data privacy contributes to the success and longevity of any business through compliance.
Some of the data privacy practices that help website/application designers include:
Privacy by Design
Privacy by Design (PbD) is a design framework (every UX designer must know) under VSD (Values Sensitive Design) developed by Ann Cavoukian initially for systems engineers.
This framework largely and proactively embeds privacy into the design and operation of products and services for non-IT and IT systems, networked infrastructure, and business practices.
In brief, it states that one should minimize the personal data collect by default, keep it secure, and destroy it when it is no longer needed while promoting transparency with users and customers.
Privacy by Design means that organizations need to include privacy from the initial design stages and throughout the complete development process cycle of any new products, processes, or services that involve personal data processing. They also need to ensure there is no zero-sum trade-off between privacy and other interests.
Every UX designer needs to be familiar with the factors and inclusions of data privacy in each of the abovementioned phases.
The seven foundational principles of Privacy by Design (PbD)
1. Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial
The Privacy by Design approach helps anticipate and prevent privacy-invasive events before they happen. PbD prevents privacy risks and infractions in physical design through organizational practices and regulations. This includes:
2. Privacy as the default
Privacy by Design seeks to deliver maximum data privacy by ensuring that personal data automatically protect in any IT system or business practice. Even if an individual does nothing, their privacy remains intact since it is in-built into the system.
3. Privacy embedded in the design
When embedded in the design and architecture of IT systems and business practices, privacy doesn’t bolt as an add-on. Instead, it remains an essential component of the core functionality deliver without diminishing it.
4. Full functionality – Positive-sum, not zero-sum
Privacy by Design does not merely involve declarations and commitments; it relates to satisfying all legitimate objectives in addition to the privacy goals. Privacy by Design is doubly enabling in nature, permitting full functionality − real, practical results and beneficial outcomes for businesses and customers. It accommodates all legitimate interests and objectives in a positive-sum “win-win” manner and avoids making unnecessary trade-offs.
5. End-to-end security – Lifecycle protection
Privacy by Design is embedded into the system and extends securely throughout the entire lifecycle of the data involved. This ensures that all data is securely reserved and destroyed at the end of the information management lifecycle in a timely fashion.
6. Visibility and transparency
PbD is necessary to establish accountability and trust. It assures all stakeholders that whatever the design practice or technology involved operates according to the stated regulations and objectives, subject to independent verification.
7. Respect for user privacy
PbD helps designers maintain firm privacy defaults, appropriate notice, and user-friendly options that consciously design around individual users' interests and needs. Respect for User Privacy is made possible by the following FIPs:
Designers need to implement human-centered, user-centric, and user-friendly UX designs to reliably exercise informed privacy decisions.
What does PbD mean for designers?
Nailing Privacy on your Website or Application
Here are some key tactics to balance privacy and design principles perfectly on your website or application.
Cookie banners
While free-to-read ‘journalism’ needs ads to support their business model, it is vital to consider how much data you need to provide the best user experience. The cookie banner is the first thing a user interacts with when he visits your website.
Privacy hub
Using the privacy hub feature, the user can change his cookies settings in detail, request his data, or learn more about your privacy policy. The website design should ensure that,
Tracking
Designers must use tracking tools like Google Analytics for quantitative data that tests and validates ideas and quantifies user experience as a metric.
Technological infrastructure
Designers of privacy-first websites should choose a technical system that is fully GDPR-approved. An SSL-certified website always garners user trust, primarily when third-party technologies use.
Transparency and trust
Transparency is design influences trust. Designers need to ensure that the design and content of a website are open and communicating in a clear language, look, and feel.
Wrapping up
Together with the seven principles of the Privacy by Design framework, these steps will dramatically change the way UX designers around the world manage data on websites and applications that are GDPR compliant.
Not sure about the GDPR compliance of your UX designs?
Count on Radiant Digital for a quick evaluation and help in championing privacy-first designs.
by Lam Huynh, Radiant Digital
Principal UX Designer
All rights reserved. © 2020 Radiant Digital Solutions
Introducing DataOps: A Game-Changer for Data-Focused Businesses
Many businesses face the challenge of getting the right data to the right people at the right time.
Business systems obtain large volumes of data from various sources constantly. They need to mine key quality data to support critical decision-making. This embodies data management challenges ranging from procurement to high volume storage and transactions to deriving insights while making the process time cost-efficient.
The DataOps paradigm helps gain business agility by transferring and pushing data from various sources into a centralized platform.
Many businesses claim that some potential transformations didn't gain fruition because 97.5% of their data never made it into the designated teams' hands.
With DataOps, “what if” scenarios relating to data usage will diminish because of how the right data will empower teams.
What is DataOps?
DataOps is a data management framework influenced by the agile methodology, lean manufacturing, and DevOps to democratize data, build trust, and improve team collaboration.
This collaborative data management practice focuses on improving communication, integration, and automation of data flow. It helps to make data collection, analysis, integration, and implementation seamless.
Purpose of DataOps
There are many central objectives of DataOps. They are to speed-up data processes, automate the data engineering functions (data gathering, assembly, and curation), streamline the ingestion of data from various sources into centralized or distributed big data platforms, and provide business users with quality-driven data consumption.
DataOps takes the existing best practices of DevOps for continuous data integration, builds upon the recursive process using agile principles, and mandates quality checks/metrics at every step within the CI/CD pipeline.
According to a survey of 1,300 executives by CA Technologies in 2019, companies embracing DataOps and agile practices are experiencing a 60 percent increase in revenues and profit growth. They are 2.4 times more likely than their mainstream peers to grow their businesses at over 20 percent.
Businesses need to know the specifics of how to achieve this when data has become denser, diverse, and distributed.
The Need for DataOps
At Radiant Digital, we have identified a clear path to completely unleash the full power of the DataOps Advantage. Here’s why your organization will need the DataOps Advantage.
1. To bring better focus on the quality of data and its evolution through the best practices.
2. To ensure data governance and security while being used, reducing operational risks, and enabling new capabilities.
3. To improve business scale that allows the business value from relevant and timely data.
4. To move towards becoming a data-first organization that promotes collaboration among data consumers and data creators to drive value across the enterprise.
Challenges addressed by DataOps
Bad Data Quality
Low-quality data loses credibility in the entire analytics setup. Diverse data formats, data types, and schemas can cause integration complexities and data errors. These include duplicate entries, schema changes, and feed failures that can be difficult to trace and manage. Also, constant updates in the data pipeline need continuous validation, which is time-consuming.
Data Silos
The increased number of data pipelines with requirements from data analysts, scientists, and data-intensive applications have resulted in data silos disconnected to external pipelines, data generators, and datasets. As data resides in different systems and platforms, gaining access and control over them and identifying the right data is daunting.
Data Processing
A data pipeline includes integration, testing, and analytics that are overbearing. Data scientists work long hours to make sense of the data collected and segregate it. The automation of data analytics and other data handling processes can make the processes less complicated, more reliable, fast, and quality-centric for ETL engineers, data analysts, and data scientists.
What can Organizations achieve with DataOps?
DataOps helps organizations become more data-driven with emphasis on quality. Business Owners can make informed decisions using validated data, while data Scientists can develop models based on a catalog of information rather than investing in time-consuming Data Mining activities.
Benefits from DataOps
Streamlined Processes
Teams can adopt toolchains and workflow automation when dynamic data is introduced to systems from multiple sources for transformation, modeling, visualization, and reporting.
Better Collaboration
DataOps helps channelize data to the right systems and teams to promote self-service data solutions and better collaboration and productivity solutions. This mitigates the risks of slow data operations, data silos, and obsolete data.
Reliable Automation
In addition to data capture and mining, DataOps supports simultaneous activities like the generation of dynamic code, testing, modeling, and enhancements to the existing code/tools that utilize data.
This can be leveraged using fixed datasets and containerized environments with automatic versioning to enable developers, testers, analysts, and engineers to speed up the changes to production and the pipeline's feedback mechanism.
The other significant advantages include:
- Improved team collaboration through a shared understanding of data
- Improved data management efficiency and quality through statistical process control (SPC)
- Quick TAT for defect detection and bug-fixing
- A quick and effective response to new requests
- Helps avoid catastrophic scenarios through predictive data analytics and recourse
- Better operations and support
Important Considerations
If your teams are working on a hybrid data ecosystem, here are some requirements met by DataOps.
DataOps automates a subset of Operations in the Data Management Process.
A standard DataOps process consists of the following stages and aspects.
Wrapping up
Data teams would not only deliver with DataOps principles but deploy and help businesses make decisions on-the-go. It ensures that this is done without compromising data quality or integrity at your business's speed.
However, multiple challenges come from converting your data into value through DataOps without expert guidance.
At Radiant Digital, we help you overcome them and discover the full potential of your organization's data. Connect with us to learn more.
Learn more about the Principles, Processes, Framework, and the Transformation Journey for DevOps in our next blog.
by Sri Arepally, Radiant Digital
Practice Director, Big Data
All rights reserved. © 2020 Radiant Digital Solutions
[Webinar] Apply Cognitive Task Analysis to improve training
https://youtu.be/P_q5NltBP2Y
This webinar series explains how an expert’s knowledge can be more fully captured, allowing organizations to maintain their knowledge base and provide better quality training.
Our guest speaker Dr. Sheila Mitchell is a Senior Instructional Designer at Radiant. After earning her doctorate at the University of Virginia, she has worked in diverse fields such as biosecurity, safety, and the energy sector. Sheila's goal is to create efficient training firmly rooted in Cognitive Load Theory.
Balancing Space and Data Density in Designs
Using space, or the emptiness between objects, is an essential balancing element for websites and digital interfaces. It may seem as underrated as the silence between musical notes. But these are what bring your UX designs to life.
Interactive design is composed of many elements, such as layout and structure. Often neglected is negative space, which is one of the most vital, nevertheless.
The advent and popularity of online digital communication, data sharing, entertainment, and business have impacted modern UI design. Every company focuses on user retention by rolling out rich user experiences.
Space found inside and surrounding the UI component's design elements is vital to enriching this experience.
Another design aspect for enterprise applications is data density. Enterprise users typically deal with large datasets and want to maximize the content using single-page designs without scrolling or going to another page. This sometimes comes for the sake of not utilizing blank space.
Utilizing blank space is like using a canvas to paint. It can be balancing, aesthetic, and helpful in laying out the design elements and organizing content. Universal readability is key to your design and content. Components that are not correctly spaced out can give your users a hard time understanding your website's information.
Many UX designers consider it a tough call between keeping blank space and avoiding it. Many clients think of empty space as wasted real estate on a web page. They request that designers fit in more information or visual elements even if readability is marginally compromised.
Many users need to see as much information as possible on the page as they are dealing with tasks and systems that require lots of data.
On the contrary, some users find it hard to digest crammed-up content, which ultimately impacts the business.
In this blog, we help you understand reconciling with what enterprise users need without discounting the basics of design principles when it comes to spacing.
Say hello to spacing
The visible negative space between screen elements can be color, texture, pattern, or even a background image instead of just being blank.
Why negative space?
Design theory encourages the use of negative space for elegance and improved user experience quality. According to UX designers, negative space is an excellent technique of balancing design elements and better organizing content while working correctly between words and pictures.
It has a calming effect on readers when too much information bombards them.
The other reasons why using negative space is essential to include;
Legibility
It is necessary to make the interface content legible and appealing. As a designer, you should consider negative space when specifying the design typography, such as the font, color, size, style, kerning, leading, and tracking. Changing the spacing in layout impacts readability, and eventually, the performance and overall user experience dips if not used appropriately. Remember, engaged readers, are more likely to stay on your business page.
Design tone and branding
Spacing contributes to the tonality of the overall design and appeal of the brand. Websites with more negative space may reflect minimalism and luxury. Web pages with less negative space may seem informative.
However, this depends on individual user perception, and it's always recommended to test the use of negative spaces before applying them.
Focus and attention
Negative space usage can help users navigate through interactive content. It may help gain focus and anchors the user's attention to targeted areas of the layout.
When designers strategically plan for a website, they must prioritize the placement of specific elements or content. There are many visually balancing methods to throw the spotlight on particular features. One is to play around with negative space, which branding and print industries apply to draw attention to brand messages.
Improves comprehension
Using space evenly makes the design content easily comprehendible. A recent study indicated that the ideal use of blank spaces between lines of paragraphs and its left and right margins could improve comprehension by almost 20%. This is where micro blank space plays a pivotal role.
A properly placed negative space can give users visual cues about where they should be looking. This offers plenty of visual buffer around an element so that the brain can quickly process it.
Implies design sophistication
Blank space can be the catalyst to creating a certain mood or look in a design that can relate to sophistication. Using it effectively can bring these associations to your design.
Too many graphic elements make the overall look of a design sluggish and confusing. We recommend improving the design with carefully planned blank spaces instead of adding more and more imagery, defeating the purpose.
Logical grouping of information– The Gestalt Design Principle
Gestalt's theory in psychology states that "The whole is other than the sum of the parts." This defined a set of visual laws based on many design principles. The law of proximity is one of them.
It indicates that elements that appear close to each other are more likely to be perceived as similar. Understanding things like they are more similar creates the tendency to group those elements visually.
This influences the aspects our mind uses to organize visual information. If this is not the intention, then blank spaces help users logically identify the data presented. Margins and gutters between grids make it easy to handle the logical Grouping of layout elements.
Types of blank spaces
Micro blank space
This type of blank space is found between lines and paragraphs. It includes the spacing for grid images that are used to segregate menu links.
The micro blank space is linked directly to content legibility on a page. Marginal blank space, for example, impacts the reading speed and comprehension of content by users.
Macro blank space
This relates to the large space surrounding major design layout elements. Macro blank space can be found to the left and right of most websites' content and in the space between content blocks on a web page.
Macro blank spaces act as the containers of an overall design. They help defeat content clutter and guide the users in focusing on their goals while on a webpage. These blank spaces help decrease the loading time of a page too.
Based on usability, the two types of blank spaces include:
The active blank space is consciously added to your design for emphasis and structural clarity. It is left out intentionally to focus on the content and to delimit one element from the other.
The passive blank space occurs naturally in a design space. Examples include the area between words on a line or the minimal space surrounding a logo or graphic element.
Factors that determine which negative space you should use
- Content - With more content, the macro blank spaces' size will shrink while their volume increases. This compromise is essential to avoid the solid chunks of data that are difficult to read.
- Design – The UI design structure influences the micro and macro blank spaces ratio in the layout. Since the designer chooses the design style, a bias over the type of blank space in the layout is evident.
- User – User research (usage trends, demographics, preferences, etc.) helps determine the right balance of macro and micro blank spaces for a specific user profile or group.
- Branding message – Using blank spaces can impact product quality and, thus, the branding roadmap. Top brands like Apple and Mercedes Benz implement micro and macro blank spaces strategically to influence their branding.
Essential considerations for negative space usage
Negative space is an active design element
Clients usually associate more negative space with lesser content value and vice versa. On the other hand, showing more content in one view doesn't necessarily lead to "less scrolling."
It is essential to understand that negative space is an active design element with a purpose. It adds more breathing space and improves how users interact with the UI.
Negative space is a worthy investment in UX design
According to the famous calligrapher and typographer Jan Tschichold, "The real meaning of form is made clearer by its opposite. We would not recognize the day as day if night did not exist. The ways to achieve contrast are endless: the simplest is large/small, light/dark, horizontal/vertical, square/round, smooth/rough, closed/open, colored/plain, close/distant, all offer many possibilities of effective design."
Negative space is the contrast element that helps achieve functional visual hierarchy in layouts. This contrast actively aids in identifying the proximity/distance between objects.
Negative spacing powers up the visual hierarchy
Surrounding blank spaces add emphasis that leads to creating an impactful visual hierarchy. Additional value is added to chunks on the screen that need intentional focus and instant user attention.
Negative space can be used at multiple levels
Blank space or negative space is used between 2 baselines of text lines. Research has proven that a positive correlation exists between line spacing and text comprehension. The following image is an example of the above statement.
Negative space can be applied between components like labels, text boxes, buttons that flow in a hierarchical sequence.
The following image delineates the different levels of negative space applications on a page. You can also view the comparison between two different pages with distinct multi-level negative space placement.
Key takeaways
1. Figure out the significance of data to the user and their usage points along the design workflow. This can help in organizing the page.
2. Get rid of redundant or unyielding data to alleviate data density.
3. Use meaningful data visualization purposefully. Consider if it is worth taking up space on the page.
4. Use Gestalt design principles based on relevance for optimized information grouping, organization, and presentation on a page.
5. Use color meaningfully. Too many colors or variants on the page can confuse the user while looking for quick information.
6. Create reusable components for filtering, searching, sorting, and pagination of data tables. This requires a lot of user feedback and understanding of what they do and how data simplifies everyday tasks.
7. Essentially, blank space done right makes the user's experience more lightweight, easy, and comfortable to explore.
Want to explore blank space strategies that help you create exceptional UX designs?
Connect with our design team at Radiant Digital today and get your designs evaluated by experts.
Embracing Change in a Disruptive Environment
It is no secret that guiding individual and organizational change can be challenging. When faced with a new change initiative, the most pressing challenge is to motivate individuals to adapt to a recent process change, routine, or technology.
The current global crisis has made us witness challenges that have changed our business dynamics while shaping our new normal.
We have seen a material shift to remote working, e-learning, e-health services, e-government services, and surges in e-commerce activities over the last few months.
Changes will be required to improve interactions between colleagues while increasing the need to reassess virtual routes to the market.
The forced changes in our work environment and consequential social settings embody situational adaptation. They prove that change is cultivated by force or desire because we believe it will address a need.
The premise of success (or survival) for many companies is to adapt to change in a more appropriate way to customers and employees.
Set routines, predictability, and stability govern the everyday work of humans. Thus, it is crucial to understand that change does not always come easy and can be met with resistance. So how do you embrace the unpredictability of change with less resistance in your work environment?
This article focuses on tips to embrace the resistance to change, which we believe will focus on critical corporate decision-making in the future.
Approaching Change
To effectively manage change, the people being affected need to be considered the process, technology, and financial aspects.
William Bridges, an expert on organizational change, describes it as “the psychological process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the new situation that the change brings about.”
The William Bridges Transition Model identifies three stages of change experienced by individuals with a direct impact on his/her productivity during the transition. These include Ending What Currently Is, The Neutral Zone, and The New Beginning.
You will notice a curve in this transition model that starts at Endings and Ends at New Beginnings.
So what’s with the curve?
The first phase, “Endings,” focuses on the resistance that people are likely to have, followed by emotional responses like shock, denial, complaints, questioning, arguing, frustration, sadness, fear, and anxiety that come along. It then transitions to letting go of the current state of affairs.
Here, people are forced outside their comfort zones. There is also a natural drop in productivity, as change or disruption is understood better.
Useful Tips
- Identify who will be affected by describing the change specifically.
- For a person, consider what they are going to let go of.
- Accept reality and consider subjective losses and perceptions. Don’t try to rationalize change and make it objective.
- Acknowledge losses openly and sympathetically through open communication.
- Be proactive in compensating for the losses and bring balance.
- Define what’s over and what is not to avoid work overload, low productivity, burnout, incompatibility, and chaos.
During the second phase, the “Neutral Zone,” people are trapped in figuring out where to go next. This usually leads to getting geared up and equipped for the new reality with workaround mechanisms. This is paired with overcoming confusion, resentment, disorientation, skepticism, low morale, and apathy. This stage is considered the bridge between what happened and what might happen. The Neutral Zone can drastically affect our ability to be productive while coping.
Useful Tips
Create a Temporary Business Continuance by answering these questions.
- What should you continue doing/what should you not forget to do?
- What new things might you need to do or put in place or do differently?
- Ensure teams are working together and individuals have access to information.
Understand the Impact of Change
In times of change, managers must broaden their communication networks to get the real picture and prepare themselves to hear even the worst things about change.
Get creative
- The neutral zone offers a great time to step back and reflect and question the usual way of doing things with creative alternatives.
- Train people, support them and allow them to put their learning into practice.
- Brainstorm new answers to old problems – try to find ways to refine solutions until one works better than the other.
The third phase, “New Beginnings,” represents acceptance and transitioning to embrace the change. It means moving in a positive direction and thus “Increases the Curve.” It denotes excitement, potential, and commitment to new ideas.
Useful Tips
- Understand that change is happening.
- Avoid triggering old memories and uncertainties, and don’t be concerned about the consequences.
- Get back to structure, accountability, and possible pressure.
In a similar approach, the ADKAR five-step model designed by Jeff Hiatt effectively guides organizational change initiatives.
Although each model presents a slightly different approach, both begin with managing resistance. Here are some practical tips on helping employees avoid and embrace resistance at the same time
Wrapping Up
Dr. Jim Maddox, a professor at the University of Arkansas, suggests embracing resistance is “the duality of moving toward something we simultaneously desire to move away from or avoid.”
You might wonder how an organization can plan to avoid resistance yet embrace resistance at the same time.
Embracing resistance is recognizing humans have the tendency to resist change and then leaning into such resistance. This means uncovering the potential resistance to change by consulting and collaborating with those impacted by the change.
Radiant Digital has been helping COVID-disrupted organizations to embrace the resistance to change gracefully.
Our areas of expertise include remote workforce management, distance learning solutions, and consulting to transition from instructor-led training to online training.
We can help you map your change management process, prepare you for resistance, and provide simple solutions tailored to your needs. Connect with us to learn more.
Eight Essential Qualities that Help You Grow as a UX Designer
UX Designing is an area that needs creativity, flexibility (in thought and action), and a data-driven approach. It's an area of art and science that includes interpersonal and functional roles.
It requires more than the mastery of some useful wireframing tools, interaction design, visual information architecture, visual design, and human-computer interaction. UX design is all about a user-centric approach and excellent problem-solving skills.
A UX designer's skills are a different growth area and need consistent fine-tuning as you progress in your career. The essential qualities mentioned below help in enhancing these skills.
As a UX designer at Radiant Digital, I've had my ups and downs that define my work and contributions in this field. The following "areas of growth" have personally shaped me as a designer, and I hope you'll find them helpful.
Keep Learning
A UX designer should be a good and flexible learner that never stops, even if it is built. From cognitive psychology to computer science, there's always something for budding UX experts to learn and use in their learning process.
Small things like learning keyboard shortcuts, re-using symbols, and sharing/tracking design iterations can increase your productivity and speed up your workflow.
Also, staying updated with trends and news, learning new design tools, and designing outside of your day-to-day work helps me stay inspired and engaged. For UX designers, users, their experiences, and learning from them, that makes all the difference.
Being Resourceful
There may be instances where you feel you've done everything right. In the research, you've asked the customers the right questions, designed an excellent interface prototype, and checked all the boxes.
But last-minute contingencies always become spoilers. One product that you design may have multiple kinds of users. This is why keeping plan B and plan C under your sleeve is essential. Product managers, investors, developers, and operational staff will question your designs from their perspective.
It's essential to roll out different options that reflect on your thoughtfulness, spontaneity, and resourcefulness. A UX designer must learn how to be efficient in small and big ways.
Be Holistically Driven
Having a global view is always a boon in your career growth chart, especially if you're a designer. Many of my UX design colleagues are successful because they have a sense of responsibility and can take the whole product flow into perspective.
The key to this is data and user-driven. It's more effective when you can present data to support a decision from a universal point-of-view rather than having it driven by personal bias or limited vision.
A scenario-based approach and complete flexibility while incorporating the lessons learned from upstream and downstream departments in your daily work are essential.
User Empathy
This is both a quality and skill. Understanding the users' problems means enhancing your design and making it usable for them. When you know someone's problem better, you become more equipped to find a solution to it.
When you're detached from your end-users, you sometimes bypass their needs and aspirations, creating a wrong or unacceptable user experience.
Continuously listening to users, experimenting, receiving, and applying feedback become more comfortable with user empathy. The user-designer relationship is also improved when the designer is a good listener and an even better storyteller.
A designer must garner qualitative data through user interviews and quantitative data through user testing to lend perspective to your endeavors.
Open-mindedness towards Feedback
Being a liberal thinker offers a balanced view of the boundless creativity of a UX designer.
This includes learning how to take and also give constructive feedback to team members and customers. Valuing others' opinions is essential, knowing that you are part of a team. Gathering, analyzing, and utilizing user feedback can take customer investments in your design to the next level.
Feedback from customers will give you their honest take on your design. This is what helps designers grow, innovate, and flourish.
Accept Change Gracefully
As technology influences design trends and vice versa, change is the only constant in a UX designer's lifetime. Accept that designs will change, decisions will change, and people will change with time, becoming more evolved and focused.
Sometimes work profiles may change with trends that must be accepted to deliver exceptional designs. Taking that design is an evolutionary process, and mistakes are a part of it that helps get changes quickly to drive quality design outcomes.
The user and product relationship can be enhanced when changes are handled strategically.
Analytical Approach
Being analytical helps gauge UX's real impact on a business and its performance in the market.
Numbers, percentages, and ratios derived from a design help achieve better design iterations proven to have worked.
Communicate Effectively
Communication gaps can fuel misunderstandings and misconceptions in the field of UX design. Being in an area that consists of presentations, creativity, and translation of discussions to designs, effective communication is a great UX tool.
In design, well begun is half done when you make communication core to the process. It helps you become more transparent about your design's intent, and your plan can save many headaches, heartaches, and dollars in the design process.
Radiant Digital has talented UX designers who epitomize the above qualities to deliver design excellence to customers. Connect with them to share your thoughts and views for a productive career in design.