Don’t You See? You’re Not a Writer

Take it from a professional user experience designer. You’re one of us.

In the field of user experience design (designing software and apps), we think through how to take end users (the audience) on a journey from start to finish. We don’t tell them how to think, but we give them a solid framework from which their minds can fill in the blanks. We care most about their experiences interacting with our work.

The end users are at the heart of what we do. They must believe in what we give them. A great experience almost goes unnoticed as it feels so natural and intuitive. The users flow through their journey almost effortlessly. And, if it truly is that effortless, they want to come back to that experience because they get true value from it.

When it goes wrong, the users feel it. They often turn it off and don’t come back. As designers, we scrutinize over every detail of their experience. But, if the overall flow doesn’t make sense, no amount of fine tuning will fix it. With that said, the best flow riddled with silly mistakes will go down in flames. We have to account for it all.

We design experiences because we love it. We take pride in guiding our users through their journeys. We know that more often than not, our work goes unrecognized and underappreciated. But the joy of just one person feeling a difference because of the experience we’ve given them is worth all of the creative roadblocks, time frame challenges, competing interests, clashing ideas, and countless iterations. Seeing our work transform from a rough, high-level skeleton to a fully fledged product that users want to interact with fills us with true satisfaction.

So welcome to user experience design, writers. If you’d like to learn more about this craft you didn’t know you belonged to, I’d love to talk. Maybe we can help each other out. Because I’d love to be more than a just user experience designer. I’d love to be a writer like you.

If you found this valuable, please consider giving it a clap or two.

Sean is an Editor of Life in Story.

Follow Sean on Twitter @iamseankennedy

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