The scientific, yet artistic approach of UX Design

User experience (UX) design is a relatively recent field that describes the process involved in the designing of applications and products for users. This applies to many areas in our day to day lives that we may be unaware of, from the Twitter homepage on our smartphones, to online application forms for jobs and funding. In academia, UX design strives to allow researchers submitting their work to a journal, to do so as efficiently as possible, ideally speeding up the peer-review and publication of papers as a result.

Good user experience design makes a user’s experience as easy as possible, with the process being smooth and information clear and concise. It’s not only aspects of computer science and coding that is involved; but branding, visual design, and usability. It involves both scientific and artistic approaches. Daylon Soh explains why, and its benefit to technical projects, whether it be for researchers, educational institutions or businesses.

Q & A - Daylon Soh

How would you define digital product management and user experience (UX) design?

Digital product management involves creating new digital products (e.g. mobile apps or marketplaces), growing existing digital products and/or sunsetting digital products. User Experience (UX) design involves the design of all end-user’s interaction to achieve certain user goals (e.g. form completion rate and time).

How has your background led you to specialize in these areas?

Before going to University of Manchester to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Business Management, I studied game design and was taught to design interfaces and experiences from a PC gamer’s perspective.

My experience running an eCommerce startup has given me career opportunities to be a Digital Product Manager at MNCs who are innovating and growing their business.

Why it important to bring digital skills like these into university education?

Businesses are changing to meet a competitive landscape with digital alternatives (e.g. Uber disrupting the Taxi industry). We know that we are entering a future where businesses are collecting large volumes of data and customer focus is a strategic advantage.

Digital skills like data analytics and UX design will equip students with the skills to help these businesses adapt and grow to meet the competition.

UX design appears to be increasingly utilised by leading organizations.

Can UX design also benefit individual researchers and technical professionals?

UX research techniques has it’s roots in ethnography, so the discipline of collecting unbiased qualitative and quantitative data and research synthesis should be of value to support researchers and technical professionals in their studies.

The idea of formulating hypotheses and testing assumptions should also be second nature to the scientific community. In the case of UX design, we’re using these techniques to validate for commercial viability rather than uncovering new knowledge.

Above: Daylon Soh giving a presentation about UX design. Photo credit - by Kai Elmer Sotto. All rights reserved

The advantage of retaining creativity is discussed in your TEDxSingapore talk.

How can creativity be encouraged in technical industries?

Creativity can be encouraged in any organization who has the practice of formulating ideas in diverse groups, documenting them and supporting these ideas with the necessary resources to be prototyped and implemented. It can be beneficial to be taking small bets on people and good ideas.

“UX research techniques.. should be of value to support researchers and technical professionals in their studies.”

Final thoughts

Daylon Soh shares how UX design uses problem solving approaches by testing out assumptions, in similar way that is often practised in science. There is also an artistic, creative side to UX design, where new ideas are ideally encouraged in a diverse group, whether it be in a research team or a business venture. To find out more about UX design see curiouscore.com

Bio

Daylon has worked in the intersection of technology, design and marketing for the last 10+ years as both a startup entrepreneur and corporate executive leading digital product initiatives and change at companies like Unilever, Aviva and Razer.

He has been teaching UX design for the last 3 years at General Assembly and have taught for various technical colleges (Lisbon Digital School & ETIC) and universities (ESC Pau Business School & Singapore Management University).

He spends most of his time designing educational experiences in his startup CuriousCore (www.curiouscore.com).

Links

Twitter: @daylonsoh

Web: www.curiouscore.com

Email: daylon@curiouscore.com