User Experience Design (UX Design)

Manipulink

A link that makes users feel bad if they don't do the desired behavior (e.g., signup for the product).

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#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.

You are not your user

As designers, we have a tendency to assume that our users are similar to us.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#8: Aesthetic and minimalist design)

Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.

UX Design Process (Step #2: RESEARCH)

Do user research at all the stages. The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product. UX research has two parts: gathering data, and synthesizing that data in order to improve usability. At the start of the project, design research is focused on learning about project requirements from stakeholders, and learning about the needs and goals of the end users. Researchers will conduct interviews, collect surveys, observe prospects or current users, and review existing literature, data, or analytics. Then, iteratively throughout the design process, the research focus shifts to usability and sentiment. Researchers may conduct usability tests or A/B tests, interview users about the process, and generally test assumptions that will improve the designs. We can also divide UX research methods into two camps: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research is any research that can be measured numerically. It answers questions such as "how many people clicked here" or "what percentage of users are able to find the call to action?" It's valuable in understanding statistical likelihoods and what is happening on a site or in an app. Qualitative research is sometimes called "soft" research. It answers questions like "why didn't people see the call to action" and "what else did people notice on the page?" and often takes the form of interviews or conversations. Qualitative research helps us understand why people do the things they do

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#9: Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors)

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#5: Error prevention)

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#10: Help and documentation)

Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

UX Research: Explore Phase

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately. Compare features against competitors. Do design reviews. Use research to build user personas and write user stories. Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort. Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like. Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain. Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them. Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don't gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again. Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme. ———————— Follow Tog's principles of interaction design. Use evidence-based design guidelines, especially when you can't conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow. Design for universal access. Accessibility can't be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone. Give users control. Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice. Prevent errors. Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact. Improve error messages. For remaining errors, don't just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand. Provide helpful defaults. Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change. Check for inconsistencies. Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment. Meet expectations instead. Map features to needs. User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team. When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy. Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to. When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling. Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation. Avoid waste. Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people's time, also. Streamline. Consider system usability in different cultural contexts. You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries. Translation is only part of the challenge. Look for perverse incentives. Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others. Consider social implications. How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?

What makes good UX?

Good UX is usable Users should be able to learn how to use the product easily. Good UX is aesthetically pleasing Good design is pleasing to look at. Good UX delights the user The design brings the user nice surprises.

UX Research: Listen Phase

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends. Survey customers and prospective users. Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress. Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information. Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can't find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects. Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent. Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly. Give talks and demos: capture questions. ————— Pay attention to user sentiment. Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication. Reduce the need for training. Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it's expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes. Communicate future directions. Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed. Recruit people for future research and testing. Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#6: Recognition rather than recall)

Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

UX Design Process (Step #5: ANALYZE)

Once your product launches, it's time for another round of analysis. Instead of looking at the results of your research, though, you'll be taking a look at your overall final product. Some questions you might ask yourself: Where did our process go right? And why? Where did we struggle? And why? How are our users responding to the product? Did it solve their issues and pain points? Where can we improve the product? What lessons can we take away from this process for future products? By thoroughly analyzing the product and the UX process, you'll be able to get more out of the experience than just a product—you also gain invaluable knowledge you can leverage for the future

UX Design Process (Step #4: DESIGN)

Sketching, white board flows, and wireframes, site maps, user flows, mockups, icons, colors, etc. Draw , draft, redraw, redraft, etc. one of the most important things you can create at this stage is the wireframe.

UX Research: Test Phase

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them. Do qualitative usability testing. Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access. Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies. Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems. Talk with user groups. Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints. Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team. Do benchmark testing: If you're planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time. ————— Protect personal information. Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn't required, and destroy older data routinely. Keep data safe. Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience. Deliver both good and bad news. It's human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don't want to hear, but it's essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect. Track usability over time. Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements. Include diverse users. People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can. Track usability bugs. If usability bugs don't have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.

UX Design Process (Step #5: LAUNCH)

That means it's time to implement; pass everything to the development team who will create a high fidelity version of the user interface. Once it is delivered, there are several ways you can go about making sure that the product is perfect (or close to it): User testing. Like the usability test, this involves you observing your target audience using the actual program. Beta launch. This is a limited release of your product to a small amount of people with the goal of finding issues and cleaning them up before you launch it to the world. Internal testing. When your own team uses the product and tests out each facet of it. Feedback with the development team is crucial at this stage. You want to make sure that you clearly communicate any issues that arise and make sure that they are addressed before your product launches.

UX Research: Discovering phase

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don't know and better understand what people need. An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you're working with an existing product or service. Good things to do during discovery: Conduct field studies and interview users: Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you're trying to provide solutions for. Run diary studies to understand your users' information needs and behaviors. Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints. Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry? Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff? Do competitive testing. Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors' products. Discover what users like best.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#1: Visibility of system status)

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#2: Match between system and the real world)

The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.

What is the goal of UX design

Thee goal of UX design in business is to "improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product."

What is UX Design?

UX design is the process used to determine what the experience will be like when a user interacts with a product."

UX Design Process (Step #1: UNDERSTAND )

Understand the users and the users problems, as well as the brand. What is the user's problem? What issues am I trying to solve? And why am I the one with the answers. How does this problem align with your brand's mission and goals? What are your company's values and mission? How does this project contribute to that goal? To analyze requirements, follow industry standard user research methods including contextual and individual interviews, while observing the users in real environment. Conduct brainstorming sessions with clients and show them your existing product (if any) to get their feedback. Maybe work closely with Business managers (since they typically work directly with clients) to understand users and their needs. Can also ask (Product Managers, business stakeholders, client). Activities: • Meet, talk, observe and understand users in their environment. • Analyze requirements to understand and clarify Th em •. Define user personas and use-cases Outcomes: • User Personas • User Stories • Use Cases, User Flows

UX Design Process (Step #3: ANALYZE)

Use all the information you gathered in the previous two stages to analyze and distill the most important elements. User personas? User Journey Maps?

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#3: User control and freedom)

Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue.

Nielsen's usability heuristics (#4: Consistency and standards)

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Users tend to feel a design is more usable simply because it is more aesthetically pleasing.

false consensus effect

the tendency to overestimate the commonality of one's opinions or beliefs; and that others will behave similarly in a given context.