My father taught me about UX before it became very popular like nowadays. He is an Electronic Engineer and he worked so hard since young to have his own workshop. So you can imagine a 5 year old version of me playing around.
Since kid I liked to observe everything he did. He has all very clean, organized, every piece is in its place. As in every workshop, there is a very long working table with shelves over it and each box contains only pieces of their type. In front, there is a big shelve containing all the tools from backsaws, hammers, drills, many types of pliers and more.
All the engineering stuff you can imagine.
Most of the time I was with him when clients arrived at the workshop looking for his help to fix something or his advice. See, I was born in a small city so there were not too much Electronic Engineers specialized in radio communications. He became very popular because he cared about the user experience.
What? How is UX related to Electronic Engineering? Well, let me tell you UX is not just “cute design”. According to Wikipedia:
User experience (UX or UE) is a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful, and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience
With this being said, my dad did the electronic installations not just thinking about “fixing the problem”. He designed a solution according to every user’s different needs. Every product he worked on was delivered with the best materials and with a neat workforce.
He cared so much about the user needs and to bring the best quality to the service that at the end he delivered a product that was:
Clients were mind blown because they haven’t experienced something like this before, guess what happened next? They were spreading the world in all the city, my dad didn’t even had to hire a marketer or invest in publicity. Clients were doing that for him because they were very satisfied with his work!
The workshop became very popular and my father had to hire assistants because the were overloaded with customers. He also served as mentor for his assistants and because of his teachings they received job offers from big companies from the U.S.
###So, how you can implement this to your product or service?
- Your users should be your priority
- The product needs to be usable and easy to understand
- Make prototypes and test your ideas first
- Always iterate! Every app, process, tool can be improved so try to make it better
If it’s not good enough, don’t do it
He always says this to me, now this is a reminder to you. If you’re launching a product and you are not a designer, you don’t need to be! Caring about your users should be part of every product or service from the beginning.
My dad’s teachings have been with me all these years and following his steps have made me care about delivering my work with the best quality and user experience as possible.
I hope this brief story helps you to understand that you don’t need to be a designer to are about user experience for your product.