Understand responsive websites
Designing your website for multiple device types is a great way to make sure anyone who wants to use your website can.
Users need to be able to interact with website content in similar ways, regardless of a device's viewing size.
Designing responsive websites is a common and useful task for UX designers, and here's why:
A study from 2019 found that there were over 185 million active websites on the Internet,
and more websites are created every second. That's a huge number.
With so many active websites, the rate at which more websites have been created, and the number of people with mobile phones, there's a big market for professionals who can design websites that are easy to use on any device.
In other words, lots of businesses need responsive websites.
In a survey of over 900 UX designers, 90 percent reported that they had recently worked on a website or web-based application, and 76 percent had recently worked on a mobile app.
This statistic tells us that while designing mobile apps is important work for UX designers, employers will likely ask you to design web-based projects as well.
Empathize with users and understand pain points
Remember, empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation. You need to identify and understand the needs, experiences, and perspectives of the users you’re designing for.
You’ll create empathy maps, based on interviews you conduct, which highlight what a user or group of users says, does, thinks, and feels. You’ll craft personas, which are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. You’ll develop user stories, which are stories told from the persona’s unique perspective. User stories include three parts: a who (type of user), a what (the desired action), and a why (the benefit for the user). You’ll build user journey maps, which are visual representations of the actions a user takes to achieve a goal.
Pain points are any UX issues that frustrate the user and block them from getting what they need.
There are four categories that pain points can fall into: Financial or money-related pain points; product, which are pain points related to quality issues; process, which are pain points related to the user's journey; and support, which are pain points related to getting help from customer service.
Identifying the pain points a user is experiencing, will help you find potential problems that your design can solve, and this is great value for users and your brand.