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

User research

User research provides data to make informed decisions and ensure you’re building the right solution for your end users:

  • Initial data gathering: Concretely define your target audience and figure out what they ened and want. Conduct individual interviews, run focus groups, hand out surveys.

    If you are building a completely new product, focus on your competitors.

  • User personas: A realistic but fictional description of someone that is in your target audience. This helps to build empathy for the target users.

  • User needs: Also called “problem statements”, they determine what problem the app solves. Larger projects have more than one user need that form a hierarchy of needs. Always interview potential users, if possible. Otherwise, your user needs are nothing more than a hypothesis.

    Here is a description:

    A user need statement is an actionable problem statement used to summarize who a particular ser is, the user’s need, and why the need is important to that user. It defines what you want to solve before you move on to generating potential solutions, in order to 1) condense your perspective on the problem, and 2) provide a metric to be used throughout the design thinking process.

  • Define site objectives: Align user goals with business goals. For example:

    • business goal: Increase sales by 10%
    • user goal: find an item and determine if it is available, its size, and price
    • user goal: purchase the item

    You could develop a standard product page that also recommends related items to the user to increase sales.

  • Create S.M.A.R.T. goals: They ensure your user goals are reachable and effective so you can track progress and improvement. Don’t create vague goals. You should “increase sales by 10%”, not “increase sales.”

    • Specific
    • Measurable
    • Assignable
    • Realistic
    • Time-related (set a deadline)

    Another version:

    • Specific: What is the user trying to accomplish
    • Measurable: What can we measure to ensure users are successful
    • Actionable: Need to create and execute specific design and development tasks to reach the goal
    • Relevant: Ensure that the features we add to the page meet user needs and don’t make completing their task too difficult.
    • Trackable: Track the success or failure of designs over a specific amount of time

Strategies

There are lots of strategies, so we will examine them in terms of qualitative vs quantitative, and attitude and behavior.

Qualitative and quantitative

Qualitative is free-form data–it’s words. Gather qualitative data through interviews, focus groups, observations, etc. Quantitative is hard data–numbers–that is gathered from analytic tools and surveys and it validates what the users said they wanted in our qualitative data.

User attitude vs user behavior

Attitude is how users feel about something–their opinions and judgements.

Behavior is what the users actually do.

Methods

Card sorting

Asks users to group content and pages the way they would naturally expect it. Helps establish the organization of the website’s content and navigation. Write out main content types on cards.

  • Open card sort asks users to group content then provide a name for the content group. Use the label as the nav menue text
  • Closed card sort asks users to group content into pre-defined categories

Competitive analysis

Identify three to five competitors and make notes about what they do well in these areas:

  • Visual design
  • Content
  • User flows to perform similar tasks
  • Functionality
  • Navigation
  • Usability
  • Tone

Focus groups

Qualitative research with a group of 5 to 10 people. Ask specific questions and provide discussion topics to control the conversation.

  • participants should understand the topic
  • should be prospective users
  • record the session to ensure accurate notes
  • ask open-ended questions

Interviews

One-on-one sessions with a prospective user:

  • Ask open-ended questions
  • interview a minimum of 10 people
  • define a specific goal to achieve with the interview

Surveys

Mix of qualitative and quantitative data, very easy and cheap to conduct:

  • give people the chance to elaborate
  • keep it short
  • don’t ask leading questions

Usability testing

Task-based method where you watch people use your product:

  • can use clickable wireframes or mock-ups
  • record sessions if you can
  • can be costly

Informal methods

Look online:

  • Check social media
  • conduct polls on social media

UX design