User experience design (UX design) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.
A UX designer is responsible for the overall experience a customer has with a product or service, not just the visual design as is commonly misunderstood.
There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to UX design but we’ll be discussing about the single most important misconceptions among UX designers and that’s:
Does ux design require math?
Let’s find out in today’s post!
Does UX Design Require Math?
While it helps to be good with numbers, math is not required for UX design. The main reason for this is that while UX design requires numerous techniques to make the user journey more effective, it does not require math to accomplish certain tasks.
For example, while it is true that UX designers should be able to estimate the size of the font that is required to display on a page, it is not necessary that they should be able to calculate the font size using the complex formulas.
Everything now a days is plug and play and you don’t require math skills to accomplish UX tasks.
There are numerous other examples where understanding of numbers is helpful, but not essential.
1. Units
A UX designer has to understand the different units used in the web design. For designing the best user experience, the designer should know which unit of measurement should be used in any particular case.
Pixels (px) is the basic unit of measure in the web design including em, rem and percentages.
They refer to the amount of space in any particular browser. It is basically the size of the image or text. It is not an absolute unit of measurement; the size of the pixel also depends on the screen resolution. So if you are designing a web page, you will have to make sure that the pixel size is compatible with the screen size.
And having this knowledge can greatly impact on how good designs you’ll going to produce.
2. Precision
User experience (UX) design doesn’t require math, but it can be helpful. Understanding math can help you communicate your design ideas more effectively.
The general public (and even some designers) don’t always understand how to read a wireframe — but if you use math (like writing the coordinates and the measurements in PX), they will.
If you understand the basics of math — you can design and communicate your ideas more accurately and effectively and more precisely.
3. Basics
Being a UX designer, you may need to calculate the average, sum or percentage of how many users use a certain feature on your website by A/B testing.
If one kind of signup button is getting more clicks than you’ll definitely go for that design.
Thus, having a bit of math can be helpful so you can play with the percentages and pixels and make button big or small and calculate how the traffic is responding to it.