How we adopted the UX Jigsaw for our team philosophy

We’ve written many times before on this blog about the importance of UX – or user experience. UX, simply put, is the term designers use to describe how a person will feel and react when interacting with a product or service. In many sectors – and especially in digital – this “enjoyment factor” is all that separates one product from another.

This makes UX absolutely central to a business’s success. It can be the difference between losing and converting a potential customer many times over. In apps and websites especially, the higher retention rates that better UX achieves often result in greater revenue generation. After all, if we don’t like a site we can just click off it. It’s that simple.

That’s why it felt like the right thing to do when we created a specific UX Designer role here at Apps Plus. Our vision was to better support our clients to address issues such as user flow, navigation, testing and research. The UX Designer could build user-profiles and scenarios against which we could check initial site wireframes and plans. This would cement the place of UX at the very heart of all our work.

As we began to work together as a team, however, it became clear that the key to UX was exactly that co-working. The user experience is akin to customer experience in other fields and sectors: the ambient music in a store, the texture of the shelves and carpet, the attitude of the staff. All this makes a difference, and it is threaded across the offering.

This means that an entire team needs to share an understanding of where each member can individually help improve the overall user experience. An app or a website relies on so many people and skillsets to create that great UX – one person alone can’t be solely responsible for achieving so crucial and diffuse a goal.

That’s why we’ve come up with what we call the “UX Jigsaw Model”. All the components which the user will interact with are under the jigsaw– and responsibility for them thus moves from a single designer to a whole team.

For example, the user interface needs to look great and be pleasing to use – that involves UX design, but strictly speaking it’s the developer’s job. Similarly, a website needs to conform to and define a business’s brand because users expect a level of familiarity across marketing collateral – that means that brand designers, too, are suddenly in the business of UX.

Likewise, the tone of any copy needs to appeal to the target users or else they will bounce off it; the speed and reliability of loading and connecting times are of paramount importance to a good UX – and that task lands with the team’s programmer. UX, in other words, finds its way into the workstreams of everyone that works on a project – one person simply cannot wear all of these hats.

I’m a big believer that, when it comes to design, it should always follow function. In practice, that means that hitting quantitative targets has to be balanced with an empathy for the user – across the entire breadth of a project. That’s why an app or a website relies on so many other people and skillsets to create a good user experience – and it’s why we’ve decided at Apps Plus that UX design is our governing philosophy, not the job of one person.

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We provide mobile app design and development for all types business sectors. If your business is in need of mobile app development, then please contact us to arrange a consultation.

Call us on 024 7683 4780 or email us at info@image-plus.co.uk.