Intro to User Experience Design: Rethinking the Design Process

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• published: 25 Apr 2012
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Websites are not just text. As they become more complicated, taking on many of the same features as traditional software, we must think differently about the design process. Join us on April 25th for an overview of the five 'planes' of the user design process: Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and Surface, including:.: - Why strategy should always be first. - How each plane is contingent on the next. - Why strategy should always be first. - What goes into scope, structure, skeleton and surface (with visual examples throughout). The following is an incomplete transcript for testing purposes, please ignore: webinar Intro To User Experience Design:Rethinking the Design Process. the Cardinal Path UX team members, Cardinal Path design team, Mike Jones. Cardinal Path webinar yet, We'll be doing an intro to user experience design user interface designer here at Cardinal Path. What is user experience, or UX and why should we care? websites and UX. So, how does user experience deal with websites and website design. And finally, breaking down UX into five planes. We'll start with What is User Experience? Or UX. As you'll see in the industry, UX is generally the term or the acronym you'll see most for User Experience. So, what is user experience? Seems like everyone is throwing this word around right now, I see it all over blogs, and not just design blogs, but also blogs centered around business and start ups centered around big companies like Apple. Apple's been a huge force in bringing user experience to the forefront of business. But what is it? What the heck is this term people are throwing around? I thought a good place to start is the all-knowing Wikipedia. Because they're the source of everything useful. But actually, in this case, it's pretty relevant. I thought their explanation, they're synopsis of User Experience was really helpful. Basically, they said, User Experience, or UX, is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. I think that sums it up pretty well. So, basically, what we want to say user experience is is UX equals Feelings. How people feel about using whatever it is you are putting in front of them. Let's break this down a little bit. before we jump into the design of UX. I want to make sure we understand user experience and what goes into that. First up is let's break down a user. Ultimately, a user is a person. So, it's a real human being. They have dreams They have goals. They have thoughts and desires. And ultimately, when they use something they're generally doing it with something in mind that they want to accomplish at the end of it. Whether that's a product, or a website or some service that you provide, that has a user at some level. And these users are people, so they're emotional, they have feelings. And ultimately, it's these feelings about your product that become the user experience. Everyday we make decisions, based on how we feel. So, the decisions that people make about your product or the final conclusion they make about your website are generally based on what they feel and not so much based on what we like to think of as the very logical steps of did they accomplish exactly what they were looking to do. That's a big part of it but ultimately, it's feelings and emotions that build that user experience. And finally, it's about experience, it's about using something. Ultimately, it's about accomplishing a goal. So, when we talk about users who have feelings, when they're using something like your product or your service, ultimately, they're trying to accomplish something at the end of that. So, we'll talk more about that in a minute. A great example is making a phone call and making a reservation at a restaurant. So, the user in this case is someone making a phone call. And ultimately their goal or their desire is to book a reservation. But there's a lot of things that go into that experience, such as: the phone they're using, or how the person answers the call on the other end, and then that whole conversation, that experience with that other person, all comes together to build the user experience. All in the blink of, you know, 5 minutes at the most. Another example might be a day trader, someone who trades stock all day. A lot of these people do that online and they're using a system that's built. They're using a product that's built for doing just that. And they're using it all day, so 8, 10, maybe even 16 hours a day, they're sitting in front of a computer, trading stocks. What kind of user experience are they building over that 8, 10, 16 hour block of time? That's a lot of time to be using a system or a product and so, over the course of that amount of time they're building up a lot of emotion about it. Either they're building a lot of positive emotion or they're building a lot of negative emotion as they continue to run into frustrations or