What is user experience?
The Dictionary describes it as:
The overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.
However in practice:
User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
Since UX is centred around the user and how they perceive a brand we must write a brand story, tell the tale of where you come from and what you are here to do.
What UX involves:
Step 1 — Research:
The research phase is where you immerse yourself in the project to get the background you’ll need to make design decisions later in the project. During this phase you will try to learn as much about your client’s business, objectives, users and competitors as possible. From this you can create personas and user journey’s to understand how the audience are already behaving.
Step 2 — Design:
The design phase is where you work out how what you are designing will work and how it will fit together. This phase will define its scope, its features and functionality and how it behaves. Card sorting for information architecture is a great way to to join the users current journeys and where the client wants them to go. Also interaction design brings usability into the process of visual design which is carried out at this point.
Step 3: Validation
The validation phase is where you identify whether what you came up with in the design phase actually works with its intended audience. This phase is typically followed by further rounds of design and testing to solve the problems you inevitably find when you test with users.
The point is to meet the core needs of the customer without fuss or bother to then develop the reliability, usability and visibility. Go through Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs its only when the fundamentals are present that you can wow!
Customer Journey mapping
Customer journey mapping is to discover how the users behave not to prove theories
What is it?
A process where you break down the user journey to find the needs and expectations across different touch points.
How can we solve the needs?
What ideas can we come up with to meet these needs
What is the context?
Think of context which these behaviours happens in this may change the users perception
Customer journey mapping can be run as a workshop involving the client account managers designers and developers at the beginning of a project to get a well rounded understanding of how every person thinks the user behaves.
Sprints:
User testing:
Doing something is better than doing nothing
What you test:
Design interations
Live website or apps
What your doing:
Testing is to find things that need fixing, its for insight not for measurement.
Tips:
1. Test little tasks and do it often
2. Use meeting rooms, not labs. They are a more comfortable environment so you’re likely to get better results.
3. Keep it small, up to 6 users (make sure these are the targeted users)
4. Be clear and helpful, but dont enfroce your opinion/assumptions.
5. Have a script, but dont read it out like a robot.
6. Test taks not features. People behave naturally when they are trying to carry something out. But make the tasks realistic not choose wherever in the world you would like to go.
7. Invite members of the team (design/development) to observe
8. Record everything (clicks, spoken word) but try to automate,
so you’re not distracted.