A Breakdown of UX Design Services By Jenna Erickson, Codal Inc
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User experience design is a fairly new industry. In fact, there are not many colleges that even offer this as a major. While there are majors for Web Design, or Human-Computer Interaction, “User Experience” is rarely something that is studied in a four year college. Chances are that you have heard of General Assembly, or “GA.” Many UX designers who work for a UX design company, or are knowledgeable on user experience research services, graduated from one of General Assembly’s programs. GA also has programs for iOS development services, and other programs for mobile app developers. Since user experience is such a new industry, let’s break down services that are provided by a UX design agency. What types of tasks are conducted? What services do these types of companies offer? We’ll break it down in a few simple categories. The Research Most user experience design agencies will offer you UX UI Research. A large range of UX research services can be conducted, including the following methods: Ethnographic research, market research, user surveys, user interviews, focus groups, data analysis, competitive research, heuristic evaluation, observational review.
The Conceptual Design The next category, “conceptual design” is when the user experience designer starts putting together a working prototype for your app or web project. Every application development agency might conduct different activities to prototype an app, but most UX designers will typically create sitemaps, conduct card sorting activities, create empathy and journey maps, and perform a content audit prior to creating wireframes. There are a large range of tools that can be used for wireframing, two popular ones include Sketch and Axure. The Detailed Design The detailed design stage is more part of UI design service, rather than UX. UX and UI are different, however, user interface is part of user experience. When it comes to detailed design, or UI design, style guides and mood boards are created, usability testing is conducted, and pixel perfect mockups are designed. If you are interested in learning more about user experience design services, or working with a UX design agency in Chicago, I would recommend checking out Codal. Their services include technology strategy, UX and UI design, and software engineering.