User Experience

User Experience Encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

Smile chart —

User Interface (UI)

The pages, menus, images, icons and buttons you see on a screen.

Content Strategy

The planning, development, and management of content — written or in other media

Common Roles in UX

User Researcher — Ashish

Information Architect

Interaction Designer

Visual/Graphic Designer

Front-End Developer — Saloni

Project Manager

The UX Process:

Company and Industry Research

1. Brand

Represents the intellectual and emotional associations that people make with a company, product, or person. Brand is something that actually lies within each of us

Questions to Help with Brand Identity — Marketing Team

What is your business about?

Who are your customers?

What problem do you solve?

Is there a unique story behind your business?

What are five adjectives or phrases that describe your desired brand

2. Culture

The beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle business transactions. Often implied, not expressly defined

Questions to Help With Culture

How do employees act at work?

What are common behaviors (both good and bad)?

What does this job/company mean to employees?

Would employees go somewhere else if they could

3. Reputation

Collective judgments of a company based on assessments of financial, social and environmental impacts

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Warren Buffet

10 Components of Company Reputation

Ethical

Employees/workplace

Financial performance

Leadership Management

Social responsibility

Customer focus

Quality Reliability

Emotional appeal

4. Industry News — Let’s see a few other resources for finding that information

5. Competitors — Who are our competitors? And what are they doing right now?

Questions to Ask About Competitors

Who are our three main competitors (direct or indirect)?

How do we set ourselves apart from our competitors?

What do we like and dislike about their brand and experience?

6. How Business is Run

How will our UX project fit with how things are generally done around here?

Can we get buy-in from stakeholders

Are we competing with other priorities and initiatives

Will our proposed solution jive with what the rest of the company is doing?

User Research

Focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies

There are many methods available —

Interviews

Contextual interviews — I’ll be observing while you complete your everyday tasks

Personas —

Focus groups — Let’s have a discussion

Surveys — What are your 3 favorite things about the software? What are your 3 least favorite things about the software

Card sorting — Take the information and organize it in a way that makes sense to you

Wireframing —

Prototyping —

Usability testing —

A/B testing — Try the tasks on Design A, then try them on Design B

Information Architecture

A fancy way of saying the organization of a site. And its labeling and navigation system.

A solid information architecture helps with findability and understandability Steps to defining an information architecture —

Inventory all content —

Conduct a content audit —

Design the new architecture —

Test with users —

Iterate

Wireframe

A visualization tool for presenting proposed functions, structure and content of a web page or website

Low-Fidelity Wireframes —

Get your ideas down

Solidify a rough concept

Quick, easy, cheap

High-Fidelity Wireframing —

Add more detail and substance More realistic Can be used to build an actual visual design Easier for clients to grasp what the end product will look like

General Rules for Creating Wireframes

Keep them practical and usable — Don’t be too worried about tidiness and perfection

Iterate, iterate, iterate — Don’t be afraid to throw things away and start over

Visual Design

Focuses on the aesthetics of a site and its related materials by strategically implementing images, colors, fonts, and other elements

Here’s where we build the wireframe into a polished product that could be presented to the end user

Elements and Principles of Visual Design

Lines

Shapes

Color

Texture

Typography

Graphic Designer

Their job is to “make things pretty” is not true.

This is just not true. It’s a common misconception and maybe people just don’t have the right words to describe it. But visual designers don’t just make things pretty. Sure the output is probably beautiful, but it goes a lot deeper than that.They have a way of displaying information so that it’s readable and highlights key points. There’s a visual hierarchy, a connection of the elements. The information flows correctly. Common elements are treated the same way, so that you know that they’re the same or they’re treated differently so that you know that they’re different or important.

Principles of Design:

Alignment

Contrast

Visual Hierarchy

Proximity

Layouts

Whitespace

Consistency

Usability Testing

Usability Testing A technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users.

Benefits of Usability Testing

Determine if users can successfully complete tasks, and how long it takes to complete them

Measure satisfaction with the site

Identify changes necessary to improve satisfaction

Analyze performance of the system

Heuristic

A rule of thumb, or educated guess that reduces the search for solutions in domains that are difficult and poorly understood.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom -Support undo and redo
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use — Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

Resources

uxmag.com

blog.usabilla.com

usabilitygeek.com

nngroup.com

uxpa.org

usability.gov

goodui.org