Having a design in mind and then creating it is a process of developing a user experience. One needs to differentiate it from just the programming activities or the technical working to how will you and I look at it visually. Although this process does not convince most people as it is kinda messy and leaves one baffled identifying the designs or its prototypes. Hence, there has to be a balance between the process of defining a design and actually creating it for user experience. So here are three balances that we have work upon
The Cost is the harsh truth
This is the harsh truth. When an organization does not have faith about generating some form of return on investment, which is the primary rule of economic transactions for business entities (financial or otherwise), they they would simply not consider having a website. To explain it otherwise, is the website isn’t paying, you have certainly not done your job properly and be ready for criticism you won’t want to hear. Irrespective of what we may think, our primary objective is always to deliver our clients’ set business objectives. You should know creating a great user experience is a means to this end, which is certainly going to be an apprehensions for business to invest and sometimes is an actual costly affair. But we do not create great user experiences just to make users happy or our clients. It is to be done so users favorably look at the website and take actions that will generate the returns for our clients want.
Balancing your business needs against the user needs
Well in most of the projects that you might take there is this glitch between what the business needs and what are the needs of a user. Like for an instance fields in an online form, need to log in, who to grant access, the embedded ads in mobile apps and what not! And then if you don’t really understand the user needs well, you end up creating bad user experience. Oh and unless you consider the business, there is no experience at all, and you might end up doomed.
Balancing the user needs and the system constraints
So with this constant rush in the transitions in the world of technology, i you look back about a decade ago, things were at a lighter speed and people had not even adapted very well to even a computer (well now it ceases to exist). With any interface or interaction, the designer’s main aim should be to reduce complexity to the optimum. Which has to be balanced with what can be readily accomplished on the technical side and the cost of doing so.
Balancing with the visual and the technical
A digital interface anything that belongs to a digital spectrum be it a device or a software will always have somethings in specific i.e. its visual aspects (fonts, colour, images or layout) and the technical aspects (navigation, interaction, etc). The designer must keep in mind that the final product must never be eccentric, it should not only concentrate on the visual factors that the technical ones become unusable. That would make a bad user experience and I am sure anything bad is never satisfactory to a dedicated designer.
If you are a business stakeholder, the next time anyone asks your feedback, remember to keep the balance in your mind. That will help you to make rational and business oriented decisions.