User experience

User experience is the interaction someone has with your product and how that interaction makes them feel about your product.

These are the parts of the UX Honeycomb, which represents the different aspects of a product that are required to creaet a meaningful and valuable experience:

  • Useful: Does it fulfill a need and do so successfully?
  • Usable: Is it easy to use?
  • Findable: Is it easy to find things and navigate through the site?
  • Valuable: Does the site bring value? Does it create profit or fulfill a mission?
  • Desirable: Is it well-designed? Does it use branding, imagery, and other elements to create a visually pleasing experience?
  • Credible: Can users trust the content and source?
  • Accessible: Is it accessible to users with disabilities who use assistive technology?

UX design

This usually focuses on visual design, which can be broken down into the following areas:

  • research: The foundation of any project. You ID the target audience to understand their needs and behavior.
  • design: WHere the site planning, layout, and visual design start to take shape–wireframing, IA, UI design, static visual design, interactive prototypes
  • prototyping
  • testing
  • measurement

UX writer

Research and develop user personas to craft copy for all pieces of the user interface that customers come in contact with.

  • sometimes called “microcopy”

UX methodologies

Frameworks to complete work. They are flexible and do not have to be followed completely. The most common are user-centered design and double diamond process.

User-centered design

Every stage of the project focuses on the user. There are four general phases:

  • Specify the context of use: ID the primary target audience, why they use the product, their requirements, the context that they will use it
  • Specify requriements: What business reqs or user goals need to be achieved?
  • Create design solutions: create wireframes, visual mockups, prototyping, and begin development
  • Evaluate designs: test designs and prototypes with actual users

Double diamond process

Combination of divergent thinking (exploring a problem widely) and convergent thinking (taking focused action). This centers more on creating designs rather than users, while keeping users in mind throughout the process.

You can break this down into four phases:

  • Discover: Research to gather data
  • Define: Filter the research to focus on the problem you are solving
  • Develop: Explore multiple solutions
  • Deliver: Hone solutions to the most successful one, and deliver it