UX Designers should know about data modeling
I understand that the UX methods lately are geared towards human psychology, but what always gets ignored in the mix is the technical feasibility of the design.
Yes, we want to know who are users are.
Yes, we want to help the users solve their problems and make their lives easier.
To know them more, how do we clearly lay that out?
I had experience working on software architecture and infrastructure in the past — and moved on to specialize in UX. I feel that UXDs should also keep in mind that the research communicates those journeys well, and how those users interact with each other in the software, I guess in a more accurate term, “entities”.
Entities are defined concepts that are related to each other in a system. It could be a person/role (e.g. Student, Teacher), object (e.g. Class schedule, lessons), etc.
Why am I calling this out?
UX usually helps with the skeleton or building blocks of the design solution. How are these entities related? You may have heard of this if you took up database management: one to one, one to many, many to many relationships. There’s also the scenario where it is mandatory or optional.
In this case, a student can have many classes but must have at least <X>, a class must have at least <X> students, etc.
I think this is an essential part during the discovery phase of knowing who the users are. It’s not additional work, more of it has to be integrated when we are learning the user journeys.
Another way to show how entities interact with each other are through swimlanes, like the business process model.
This method is extremely helpful for more complex software. Some diagrams even show turnaround time and matrices depending on how many more participants are in a system.
Remember — as UX designers, we are championing the user needs. There should be no limit or defined process on how we can understand and serve them better.
If you know of any more unconventional methods or have thoughts about this matter, feel free to share in the comments!
Thank you for reading!
