About User Experience
User Experience (UX) is the quality of an experience that a person has while interacting with a specific design. This can be something simple (like your cup), something more complex (like a website), or something that is an integrated set of designs (like a museum). UX is a complex array of responses and actions based on this interaction. Some of these are practical, some emotional and some unconscious (learned over time and performed more or less automatically).
A successful UX web experience allows a user to quickly and easily accomplish their task while allowing the business to gather the specific information needed to fulfill their requirements. It’s not uncommon to confuse “user experience” with “user interface” — after all it’s a big part of what users interact with while experiencing digital products and services. But the UI is just one piece of the puzzle. Interface is a component of user experience, but there’s much more. It isn’t about cosmetics, pixel-pushing, and button placement. It’s holistic and it’s everyone’s concern, not just the realm of ‘artistic’ types. UX is more than just skin deep.
UX is not a step in the process…it is the process. In order to create a great experience for your users, not just design something that we’d like to use, we need to keep listening and iterating. It doesn’t have to be a rigid process, but it does need to exist. UX design isn’t a checkbox. It needs to be integrated into everything you do. It isn’t a discreet activity, solving all a client’s problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.
User experience isn’t even about technology. As a painter uses paint to communicate concepts and emotions, user experience designers use technology to help people accomplish their goals. But the primary objective is to help people, not to make great technology. User experience design is not limited to the confines of the computer. It doesn’t even need a screen. User experience is any interaction with any product, artifact, or system.
The trap
Nobody wants to believe that what they are offering is of poor-quality or deficient because nobody sets out to achieve a bad design as a goal. It’s always a risk. Bad designs and bad experiences happen. The most common flaw is that companies think good experience design is an add-on, not a base requirement.
A trap that a lot of companies fall into is in thinking that they are their own end users. Both product managers and programmers believe they will create the experience as they build it.
If you make assumptions about the people you expect to use your product or service — who they are, how they behave, what makes them tick — you’ll probably always be wrong. But take the time to get to know them, and hire the appropriate person to facilitate the process, and you can ensure you’ll get it right.
UX Factors
Factors in UX- User Needs
- Business Constraints
- Technical Specifications
UX design incorporates:
- Information design, architecture and taxonomy
- Web and interface design
- Identity and brand design
- Content and social media creation and maintenance
- Conducting regular qualitative feedback sessions with users
- Authoring functional requirements for new features
- Sketching interactive elements for design teams to iterate
- Providing project management and quality assurance for any development efforts
- It needs to be easy to use
- It needs to be intuitive
- It needs to have logically arranged information
- It needs to be visually pleasing
- It needs to be functional on the user’s device
About Personas
Personas are not a demographic, a segment or a group. A persona is a fictional yet accurate depiction of an actual user. The goal of a persona is to humanize the target audience so we can better understand their motivations and behaviors and how they will impact the product we are creating. Personas then become of the center point of our development process, always ensuring that we are designing the solution with the end user in mind.
The process typically begins with baseline demographic information that provides me with a broad picture of the intended audience. The next step involves augmenting the known demographic data with quantitative insights to identify core similarities and differences that will help start to form audience segments. The next step involves further sifting by using comparative analysis from third party sources as well as qualitative research in the form of surveys, interviews and questionnaires conducted with the identified target.
Once the differentiating factors between the various individuals are fully identified, a final validation is conducted by conducting more extensive interviews with subjects who closely match the personas. Such individuals can also be used for user tests on existing interfaces for the purposes of auditing websites and competitor analysis as it affects the core of the target market.
The end result is typically three to five individual, humanized personas. Each persona contains a name and picture along with an extensive background (including city, job title & salary, marital status, age, race, family, etc.), prime motivators, expectations, buying patterns, technology patterns, pain points, favorite brands, etc.
Context Scenarios
What is a context scenario? A context scenario is a textual description of a persona’s interaction with a future product or service. They are high-level and optimistic, focusing on ideal system behavior in situations that will happen.
The goal is to describe the customers’ needs and avoid specific solutions as much as possible. In other words, we need to know that she somehow gets the nail into a piece of wood but don’t care if it involves a hammer, a wrench or the heel of her shoe.
Key Path Scenarios
What is a key path scenario? A key path scenario digs deeper into the specific required interactions that each task generates. We begin to see the tasks in the context of the greater whole and look at specific solutions that the interface needs to address.
Within the context of the previous scenario, a key path will create a road map that can be used with wireframes and storyboards to further detail the experience and make sure we are solving the user's actual problem, not the problem we think they have.
Interaction Design
Good interaction design is grounded in an understanding of real users—their goals, tasks, experiences, needs, and wants. One I understand the context, I begin to sketch the interfaces that will facilitate the necessary interactions. I like to sketch these interactions on a pad first, then validate them with the team before proceeding to the next step. It's also good to start informal user testing as early as possible.
