How to achieve Work – Life Balance | YUJ Designs

This article was originally shared on — https://www.yujdesigns.com/how-to-achieve-work-life-balance/


What was called work-a-holism back in the day has now become – finding your purpose and going all-in to achieve it. The competition has become severe. In UX design studios as well, people are working long hours to make the customers happy, to climb up the ladder in the company. These ambitions often result in increasing work demands, commitments. Though, in the long run, this immense load of work and the expectations start becoming a burden. Setting and keeping boundaries in professional and personal lives has become challenging for everyone, from a beginner to a leader. Work-Life balance has become a real struggle at any stage in life.

Whenever an obstacle occurs one falls back on the values they believe in, to gain the much needed strength and a clear direction to move forward. YUJ Designs has formulated 9 core values that form the foundation of the company’s culture. Striking a balance between work and life, is one of them. We believe, work and life are two wheels of an individual’s being. If we are passionate about what we do we shouldn’t need a break from doing what we love. People are never truly happy with work when they don’t care for their work. Life at YUJ, often gets busy. And in order to stay on top of our game, we do take creative breaks. We make time to do the things we love, even at work. Here are some ways you can achieve work life balance in –

1. Set your priorities right

Despite our obsession with moving forward in the world faster, the overall productivity growth rates have become stagnant. At the same time, the stress levels are going up. We are producing more and more productivity tools and yet have less results to show for it. The ‘doing more to get more things done’ attitude isn’t proving useful. Instead, managing the tasks according to the priorities each day and targeting on the completion has worked better. This also helps the person focus delivering high-quality projects. So, ‘Working smartly to achieve more’ attitude should be encouraged.

2. Find a routine that fits

Set your own reasonable boundaries and try to keep up with those. It is quite possible for a person to let his/ her limiting beliefs such as – feelings of obligation, guilt get in the way of respecting these boundaries. Find a routine that works best for you and stick to it. Keeping time for work priorities is as important as keeping time for rejuvenating yourself, keeping yourself fit to be able to deliver creative and productive solutions. Take this opportunity to model a healthy behavior. One that influences good change around you as well.

3. Aim for efficiency

When working in a team, see to it that the work is distributed evenly. Otherwise this easily leads to burnout. This has a domino effect on the individual’s performance which has a bigger impact on the team performance and morale. Managing work in reasonably timed deadlines provides learning opportunities to everyone inspiring everyone to aim for efficiency and excellence.

These small steps towards managing work in a better manner, have a larger impact on helping people to achieve work-life balance in a holistic way. Define what success means to you and aim for it with a nurtured – happy mindset. Mindset over matter is the new mantra!

You may also be interested in Resources that’ll make you a better UX Designer.

About:
YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises

How to make businesses UX friendly | YUJ Designs

UX Designers FINALLY have earned a seat at the table. Industries are welcoming the user-centered methodologies with open arms. This is a victory. One that was earned through a lot of hard work, a lot of convincing. It is good to be heard. It is, indeed a good time for UX design studios worldwide. Now that other industries are all aboard the UX-ship, let us try to understand how can we help them inculcate UX design in their organizations.

1. Know where you stand

Becoming UX friendly is a big challenge for most organizations. It is even harder for orthodox hierarchical companies. Businesses all over now understand that UX is a major business differentiator. 70% of enterprise CEOs now see UX as a competitive differentiator, according to a recent survey. UX maturity plays an important part in the bigger picture. Businesses need to embrace user-centered methodology for a better business growth. The first step would be to assess your current position.

2. If you please the users, you’ll be in the business

This is the essence of UX design methodology. In large organizations, as the divide between the users and the products/ services can be vast, it is essential to incorporate UX methods. An institutional focus to bridge this gulf by focusing on the users’ goals and needs is necessary. Businesses should focus on building the solutions around them. UX process should be consistently integrated into the product development cycle. This way the business solutions will be more relevant and emotionally resonant.

3. Embrace UX maturity

UX maturity is now crucial for every business that wants to stay relevant. UX mature businesses are where, UX design becomes a key aspect of how a business thinks and acts. The company enables comprehensive training sessions and workshops towards helping employees realize and drive forward the company’s UX vision. UX mature businesses are agile, customer-centric and have thorough, well-thought of internal processes.

It is safe to say, following these three steps, one can utilize UX design truly as a business differentiator. Being a UX design practitioner is as much a consultative role as a practical one. UX is part of a business-wide strategy and the development of products for users. Today, any business needs to be able to pre-empt market changes effectively.

About:
YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises

Reimagining businesses to create memorable experiences

This article was originally shared on - https://www.yujdesigns.com/reimagining-businesses-to-create-memorable-experiences/

Experiences matter. They are the front runners of the global economy and are capable of deciding the fate of a business. So many factors affect the experience of products and services that brands offer. The list is long. Designing points of digital interaction is just one such factor, but it’s one of the most critical components of business health of a product or a service. How users experience the brand through the digital interactions, whether they gain from the engagement in the moment, find it relatable and benefit from it in the long run, all of this figures into the overall financial wellbeing of a business. This understanding of the relation between UX design and the success of a business is what sets us, YUJ Designs apart.

We believe –

A marriage between business and user goals gives birth to a great UX design.

YUJ Designs works towards holistic design solutions that businesses require to forge a future that best serves their end-users. Our multi-disciplinary, talented team leverages a human-centered approach to deliver functional and ingenious solutions. We accelerate the growth of your business by reducing the disharmony within your existing customer experience.

Combining human-centered design approach with scientifically gathered data, we understand the customers and the business with equal dedication. Our solutions are derived from the insights into customer motivations, behaviors and values as well as the business goals.

These are the pillars we focus on to elevate your customer experience:

1. User-centered Approach to Your Business Challenges

Whether you are building a standalone digital product or a connected physical product, we can help you design a User Experience in a scientific manner. Our data-driven, user-centered approach ensures that users’ experience needs are accurately understood and fulfilled. Our UX design and development team of #DesignEconomists ensure ROI for businesses, memorable experiences for users, and ease of implementing the UX.

2. Building Empathy

YUJ Design’s approach to providing memorable user experiences is by building empathy towards product users and the business. We work collaboratively to understand your vision and ambitions and how your digital ecosystem contributes to achieving your business objectives. Through qualitative and quantitative user research, our team understands users’ goals and expectations, needs and behaviours, motivations and aspirations. Equal importance is given to understand and elicit business goals, success criteria and technological feasibility.

3. Data-driven Design

We believe, that which can be measured can be improved. Therefore, our data-driven approach tailors your products’ design to users’ preferences, goals and behaviors, which make the experience far more engaging. Our design solutions are informed through various data sources – user’s psychographics, business metrics, site analytics, trends in domain, industry, technology and design best practices. Concept designs, both interaction concepts and visual concepts are validated by testing them with users before detailed design commences. This approach de-risks your designs before hitting the markets.

4. Digital and Physical Connected Experiences

Customer experiences are no longer limited to the screen, they expand in the physical world. We see experience as a continuum in user’s life and strive to design a seamless experience across devices and spaces. We also make sure that these interactions come to life by using our technological expertise.

5. Design for Impact

We strive for one thing – creating Impact by design. Facilitating human experiences is our specialty. Our designs change the way businesses operate, creating visible value for end users and our clients. We believe that good UX must make business sense and boost your ROI on design.

Being a top-tier UX design studio with presence in India & San Jose, U.S.A., we have a substantial experience of working on design & development projects. YUJ Designs has successfully crafted B2B, B2C, B2B2C experiences.

Despite hordes of UX design studios routinely listing user-centered designs as one of their top services, many companies still struggle to reflect it through their work. Our experience designing across a wide range of domains has helped us acquire knowledge of user interactions, behavior and tasks providing us with a wide-lens view of users’ lives. This multi-domain knowledge helps our designers understand any domain faster, and helps them build richer experiences for your users. Fostering partnerships that are open and progressive with clients, is the starting point for our culture and the work we create.

You may also be interested to read about UI, UX and UI/UX?

About:
YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises

UX in age of Voice command driven devices

This article was originally shared on - https://www.yujdesigns.com/ux-in-age-of-voice-command-driven-devices/

The last 5 years have seen a huge flux in terms of AI based devices. Today, more and more people are becoming aware of AI technology and its applications. AI has already entered the homes, becoming a part of everyday life. It is the age of voice command driven assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Bixby. These are AI systems designed to interact with humans, make our lives smooth and hassle free.

“Alexa, riddle me this!”

The research phase and technology of the voice driven devices took almost two decades. In the past five years, however, giant opportunities have opened up. Everyday we are teaching machines get better in their function. Voice assistants learn and adapt based on the data they gather with numerous interactions with different sets of humans. Their responses can evolve and be built on what we say to them. For instance, navigation apps guide us based on the routes we take. Without tons of data gathered by interactions with humans, the machines would be much dumber.

Let’s cut right to the heart of why talking machines could be useful. This next-generation interaction technology offers us a way out from using devices with complex interfaces. These devices also overcome the barriers of users of using tech products. This way, the technology allows the user to interact with the machines in a natural way, just like how one would interact with another human. We teach our machines every day. Voice assistants learn how to talk to us based on what we say to them. Navigation apps guide us based on the routes we take. Without millions of teachers like you, our machines would be much dumber.

IBM estimates that 90% of the data created by humans has been generated in the past two years alone.

https://becominghuman.ai/the-voice-based-ai-trends-for-2019-b13a2bb44e54

A Rise in the Opportunities, in India –

Over 90% of the current digital voice assistants in India only work with English creating usage problems vernacular language users.

The Biggest Challenge:

On this day one of the biggest challenges voice technology is facing is – Human Language. One of the world’s biggest and complex data sets. The reason why understanding language is so difficult for machines is that, the meaning of words changes based on context and even the appearance of the letters and words. Sometimes, the spelling remains the same but, means and refers to different actions when changed its context. Languages rely on a lot of knowledge about how it works and on common-sense about the world. Those two factors blend in subtle ways.

Role of UX

You must be is familiar with Jakob Nielsen’s general principles for interaction design, called “heuristics”. Broad thumb rules for evaluating the efficiency of a product. Let’s apply these principles to voice driven technologies like – Alexa used in a B2C scenario to understand how much UX can add value to accelerate the success of the voice revolution.

1. Help Users Make Sense of the Technology

As the complexity of real world interaction is difficult to predict, the error messages should be easily understandable and should provide a constructive solution.

A grandmother attempting to interact with Google - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2R0NSKtVA0

2. Users should get Complete Control

Users often stumble upon different functions that they don’t intend to use. This is a scenario where they should be given a clear exit action/ message. It is important to avoid overwhelming the users with the information and too many choices.

3. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

The device should use accelerators for the frequent users in the messages. At the same time, new users should not feel out of place. Use confirmation messages selectively. Use of reprompting to guide the users.

An illustrated example of how Alexa can understand commands in different manners - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608571/alexa-understand-me/

“Alexa, show me the future!”

Voice AI is still in the nascent stage and a lot of research is still underway to make sense of this technology. Envisioning the market share this technology is about to capture, more and more companies should make it their aim to enter the segment and make use of the first-mover advantage. To stay ahead, business owners, strategists and marketers should experiment with the technology for their brand to transition seamlessly when the voice revolution takes over completely.

About:
YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises.

What is User Experience (UX) Design

This article was originally shared on - https://www.yujdesigns.com/what-is-user-experience-ux-design/

Do you want to know what user experience (UX) design is?

To know about it in detail, read the entire article. But before going into what is UX, we will discuss about what UX is NOT: 

• UX is not a tool
• UX is not an art
• UX and UI are not similar
• UX is not magic
• UX cannot be an afterthought

Most of the people understand UX as something that can be later thought. But, this is not what UX is. 

Now since we have broken some myths about UX, let's discuss what UX really is.

What Is User Experience (UX) Design?

User experience design has many facets. It is a larger umbrella, which covers interaction design, user research, graphic design, visual design and much more. But at the core of it is a data-driven scientific process. UX is about human psychology, which is about how your brain perceives information and how your brain understands information. All of these depend on your limitations and abilities as human beings, which is what makes user experience a scientific process.

“UX is all about the fact that business goals should be met by meeting the user needs.”

User Research

Most of the people believe that user research is the only center of user experience, but it is not true in every case. Some clients might have confidential projects where they cannot give access to users while some clients might not have budget for user research. What do you do then?  There are multiple sources of data, which will help validate your ideas or concepts. These sources can be google, finding users on your own and meeting a subject matter expert. Once you get the data,  the question arises - how can you utilize it? These data is going to draw a pattern, which you must learn to pick. That’s where UX is extremely data driven.

Finding Business Problems

Now the core of user experience is marrying business goals and user needs. 

Imagine a client demands, “We want to increase our ROI by 20%.” But how do you do that? In such cases, as user experience designer, when you talk to your clients asking them the business problem, you will realize that it is actually not the real problem. If you talk to them more and try to understand more about their business, you will find that the underline core problems are very different from just increasing the ROI. That’s when you realize that if you solve these problems, ROI will increase.

How To Solve User Problems?

Now the next question is - how do you solve user problems? You can go to the users and understand their problem, their challenges and their feelings towards a certain product. When you solve problems of certain set of users for the specific business, the problems which are underlined due to which ROI was not increasing are solved. This is where great user experience really happens. 

Suppose, a client comes up with a million dollar idea and asks how to make it a success. Once you learn that their idea at the concept level is strong, then the execution is important. It requires understanding of client’s idea and current domain as well as understanding from parallel domains. From this entire process, a large amount of data can be gathered. These data give opportunities and the new ideas would be the USP of your business.

Impact Of User Experience

As user experience designer, it is important to find opportunities based on the process, data gathered and understanding of business goals and user needs. A good user experience design can create impact in the industry only through this process. Design practitioners and people who expect from a UX design company like us to provide this service are both ill-educated about user experience. This is where the gap brings in and simple understanding of UX becomes complicated. Most people look at UX as a short-term solution, which is just making things pretty. Pretty designs don’t create impact, but the experience by using those designs creates an impact.

For example, parents want to arrange a grand birthday party of their 5-year-old kid. Here, the event manager will ask the parents, “Which cartoons, foodstuffs, cake, etc. your kid like?” This is where s/he has started understanding the kid (user) for whom s/he is designing and is also validating with the parents (business) who are going to pay the money. Finally, the event manager will come up with a concept, which is taking care of the finances of the parent and also providing the experience that the child wants to have. This is how user experience can have impact on every project and every business. 

Closing Thoughts

User experience starts with user research, then finding business problems, solving these problems and ends with creating impact by the UX design. UX is not about making things pretty or the way user is going to do something short term. Whereas, it is about building long-term relationship with your customers that helps in increasing your ROI.

About:YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises.

How Behavior influences Design?

This article was originally shared on - https://www.yujdesigns.com/how-behavior-influences-design/

Designers work towards understanding the human behavior and intentionally design experiences that would drive the desired outcome. You may not be aware of it as you roam around a Dorabjee’s store or a shopping mall, but every aspect of the experience has been designed such that you end up buying at least two objects you did not come to buy. These stores are designed to maximize the amount of money you will spend when you walk out of the store. This is intentional design at its best, weaving purpose and experience by assessing the user’s behavior and tendencies in detail. These experiences shape our perceptions of the environment, the brand. Designers capitalize on user’s biases, memories and craft a deep sensory experience for the user.

It is amazing how our brain operates on the information that is made available to us. We interpret this information and build our own perceptions. For instance, if someone mentions – Sneha brings her dog to the workplace. There are multiple possibilities of perceptions depending on the person that possesses this information. Some people might operate from a sense of fear and visualize the workplace to be a haphazard place, where employees won’t be able to concentrate on work. Not a productive workplace and would opt against it. Whereas, some people might say this is hardly a fearful situation. In fact, a pet-friendly environment is a welcome change!

Understanding Human Behaviour

The concept of understanding a person and her/ his behavior is similar to an iceberg. We only see the tip. Usually unaware of the large mass that lies below the surface of water. A person randomly chooses a red fire emoji to enhance the Instagram post. One might say the person belongs to a more fiery personality, hence the choice. Though, there’s a lot more to a person’s choices, as simple as these, than what meets the eye. The behavior and motivations underneath the surface are the ones that need to be considered to understand the user’s choices. When doing user research, we set out to understand human beings. It is very important to look what’s underneath the surface. One should utilize this knowledge and dig deep into what drives certain user behavior.

Understanding the mind of the consumer/ user

The Theory of Human Motivation

Abraham Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs was introduced in the groundbreaking 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. The theories of the American psychologist continue to be widely adopted as an explanation for human motivation and personality.

https://crm.org/articles/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs

Human beings by nature make assumptions very quickly. Designers need to understand users’ needs and desires, their motivation, what drives them. Only after studying these nuances, can a designer build successful products that are human-centered and effective. There are 3 chief aspects one should consider while studying user behavior.

1. Perceptions

They bring together a person’s past experiences with her/ his current context. They cloud the person’s judgement and world view. Let’s take an example of Uber. Everyone has experienced the surge prices when booking a ride.

The primary emotional response that the user has is a feeling of frustration, deception. The user had a certain expectation from the cab service, though when surge charges apply, a negative emotional reaction emerges. A person in this scenario would quickly assume the cab service company to be an unfair one. Whereas, all that the company is trying to do is drive revenue by making the most of the peak time. This is how perceptions are built. These perceptions lead the customer to follow or unfollow a brand.

2. Attention

Attention is shaped by context and intensity of the stimuli. There are three types.

• Selective Attention. Picking up information based on convenience.
• Divided Attention. Responding to multiple simultaneous tasks.
• Sustained Attention. Vigilance developed over time. Working Memory.

Design thinking starts with empathy. And designing products that are fit for the user’s attention spans are a necessity for the companies. For instance, in this world of short attention span, autoplay videos, disappearing stories are programmed to achieve the same goal – that the user should either stay longer or keep coming back to it as many times as possible.

The right term for these behavior sensitive designs is dopamine loops. Dopamine starts you to seek, get rewarded for the seeking which makes you seek more. This is called Instant Gratification where everything we want is a click away. It becomes harder to stop looking at or stop browsing through apps. Classic examples are email notifications, texting or even checking the phone to see if you have a message or a new text. The flipside to this emerging behavior, is illustrated below.

A humorous take on the emerging human behaviors

3. Decision Making

We know by now that the choices a consumer makes are a result of her/ his past experiences, pre-formed biases, motivation drivers among other reasons. Decision making of users is impressionable. A well-thought of design of a product can influence the user to make the purchase. Design has a critical impact on user decision.

Hence, it is crucial to work on evidence-based design for your products. Think about different scenarios in which the target audience might perform the desired behavior. Identify the positive deviants. Work towards persuading the user. Here are some psychological patterns that can help with the design strategy:

• Enabling. Enable the desired behavior by making it easier than the alternatives.
• Motivating. Motivate the behavior using incentives.

In conlusion, to design a successful product a designer should listen, empathize and engage.

About:
YUJ Designs is one of the top ux design studio in India providing consultancy as well as end-to-end solutions to B2B & B2C Fortune 500 enterprises