Week 1: Intro to UX
Introduction to User Experience Design
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Agenda
- What is user experience design?
- Can we design a user’s experience? How?
- Redesign something!
- Why is UX important?
- Who practices UX design?
What is User Experience?
Describe an experience you love:
- What is it?
- Why do you love it?
- What is your favorite part?
Experience design is the design of anything independent of medium, or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.
TK JJG diagram
User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
Simple models of comples systems are incredibly useful. Just don’t mistake the model’s clarity as greater truth that the murky reality.
The best art makes your head spin with questions. Perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between pure art and pure design. While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.
Can we design a user experience? How?
What UX designers do
- Visual design
- Interface design
- Field research
- Face to face interviewing
- Creating and administering tests
- Gathering, organizing, and presenting statistics
- Documenting personas and findings
- Product design
- Feature writing
- Requirement writing
- Graphic arts
- Interaction design
- Information Architecture
- Usability
- Prototyping
- Interface layout
- Taxonomy creation
- Terminology creation
- Copy writing
- Presenting and speaking
- Working tightly with programmers
- Brainstorm coordination
- Company culture evangelism
- Communication to stakeholders
Let’s redesign something nearby
- Redesign one aspect of the experience.
- Use your eyeballs, paper, and pens.
- Work with your group to…
- investigate: Who uses this? Under what circumstances? Why?
- prioritize: What is the most pressing problem to address?
- brainstorm: Develop possible ways to address the problem.
- synthesize: Put together a proposed plan for improvement.
- present: Share with the class when you get back.
- Form groups, observe in the wild. Go!
Why is UX so important?
Avoid “featuritis”.
Win the “experience wars”.
Who practices UX design?
The design team
- User Researcher
- Information Architect
- Interaction Designer
- Visual Designer
- Front-end Developer
- Content Strategist
- Product Manager
What startups want
Someone who can:
- conduct user research
- design the workflows
- write the copy
- create hi-fi mockups
- write the front-end code
- run usability tests…
The best UX designers are “T-shaped”
- have a good understanding of the different components that make up UX
- have general business and design experience
- have deep specialization in one discipline or industry
Additional Resources
Articles
- The Elements of User Experience, Chapter 2 by Jesse James Garrett
- Can Experience be Designed? by Oliver Reichenstein
- Can Experience be Designed? (2) by Oliver Reichenstein
Key Terms & Concepts
- User Experience
The overall experience that a person has when interacting with a product, service, or company.
- Visual Designer
The designer primarily concerned with the aesthetics of a user interface. Typically trained in graphic design or brand design, the Visual Designer focuses on colors, typography, imagery, texture, and layout details to create a consistent and memorable visual language and enhance user engagement.
- Information Architect
The person primarily concerned with the structure of information presented to the user, both across and within pages. They focus on helping users find what they are looking for by trying to understand how users organize information in their heads. IA specialists may have backgrounds in information science or library science. The Information Architect is the predecessor of the UX Designer, so most have a broad skillset including interaction design and wireframing.
- Interaction Designer
Interaction Designers are primarily concerned with designing how users move through steps to complete tasks and how the system responds to user input. They may come from a variety of backgrounds, including product design, information architecture, service design, and process design. They are typically responsible for understanding user journeys, designing user task flows, creating interaction patterns, and designing interface affordances.
- Front-end Developer
Front-end Developers implement the interfaces that users see and interact with. They write code in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that ultimately defines how the interface ends up looking and feeling in a browser. They may be considered the front-line of the user experience.
- User Researcher
While most designers conduct some types of research, some organizations have dedicated researchers to better understand users’ needs and whether or not a design can meet them effectively. Researchers are trained in a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods including survey design, user interviewing, and usability testing. While some researchers come from design disciplines, many come from social sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
- Content Strategist
Content Strategists balance the business’s communication needs with the content that users seek. They are responsible for managing the content lifecycle, which includes planning, creating, publishing, and maintaining. They often come from information architecture, copywriting, publishing, or marketing backgrounds.
- Product Manager
PMs are responsible for owning the product vision, balancing user needs with business needs, and managing development and feature rollout schedules. Typically product managers have general business and management experience, domain knowledge, and experience as a designer or engineer. Many have MBAs.
- Unicorn
“Unicorn” is a term applied to individuals that have both a broad and deep skillset, typically covering both design and development.
- T-Shaped People
Popularized by IDEO, “t-shaped” is a term that refers to people who have broad knowledge of design, business, development, and product, but specialize in a specific discipline or industry. These people tend to be effective UX designers.