- Screens are all around us, at some point in your design career, there is a good chance that what you design will extend into the interactive digital world in some form.
- UCD, user centred design means designing for individuals.
- Following a user centred process with a focus on understanding and meeting the needs of real people leads to more successful design.
- Designing for real people, understanding who they are, what they want, where they live, where they work and meeting their unmet needs leads to better design.
"19th century culture was defined by the novel, 20th century by the cinema, the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface" - Lev Manovich
- Puts the user of a product at the centre of the design process.
- Difficult for designers to see how users will perceive understand and use their designs.
- Other factors include, business goals, budget, timeline and limitations of technology.
- Need to understand what they are communicating, how that design will be realised and who the design is intended for.
- Users become your co-designers because you can't imagine all the ways someone will actually use what you create.
- Mental model, how a user expects the product to work and be used, conceptual model how it actually works, designers try to match a user's mental model in order to ensure it works the way the user expects it to. (100 things every designer needs to know, Susan Weinschenk).
- A UX designer will work closely with, technical architects, visual designers, content strategists, project managers.
- A designer and developer sketch, design and build up the final product together. A developer can help determine when it makes sense to start building and stop sketching.
- Who do they see as their primary and secondary users?
- Functionality, what the design will do, features, how it will do it.
- Suggested features, project goals and user needs, reduced set of features and functionality.
- Post it notes, what the app needs to do, personalities, most important goals and features.
- Getting to know users, who will use it, where will it be used.
- Personas, list of descriptors, where they work, interests, goals and needs, what they want, what their frustrations are. Acts as a reminder that whenever a decision is made it should take into account the needs and wants of the people for whom the team is designing.
- "A good persona should be used throughout the life span of a project, reference your persona in the wireframes and designs and talk about them in meetings and presentations, give life to your personas and you'll end up designing great experience for the people they represent"- Dan Willig
- User Scenarios, communicating what you've learned, use cases.
- Accessibility, how usable and accessible a website is to as broad a rage of people as possible.
- Know your competitors, things they aren't doing that you can do, 'white space'.
- Content, how often it will be updated, where it will come from and how it will be created. Analyse and plan. create, gather and revise, refine, maintain and revise.
'Design in the absence of content is not design it's decoration' - Jeffry Zeldman
- Designing for the right device, pushing the limits of your device. How big the screen is, how much information can be presented and still be readable. Designers are often asked to design a website first and then translate in into simplified form for the mobile web.
- Guide, motivate and engage the reader. Users need to understand where they are in the application, where they've come from, where they can go and how to get back to where they started.
- Design for user's needs, not their wants.
- Gamification, may use levels, rewards, points for completing tasks.
- Sitemaps, wireframes and prototypes, sketches first, interaction models low fidelity prototypes, high fidelity on photoshop. allow designers to test out ideas quickly in a real context form.
- Wireframes are blueprints of every page of the site.
- Functional specifications, what is intended to happen when a user interacts with the page.
- After all of this you can brand the experience, do the visual design. (Cartoon Network App)
- Brand values and personalities, functionality.
- Usability testing, usability test plan.
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