User Experience Design

JOURNAL #FIVE [DES501]

User Experience Design

User experience (UX) design coupled with the tools and methods that support the process is not only really important for producing successful project outcomes, but it is also an area I have enjoyed from my career experience. Having worked with companies to effect business turnaround through the use of, amongst other things, new website development and attitude changes to technology adoption have only reaffirmed my excitement for the creative process throughout the development stages.

I have learnt from experience how important UX design can be to shape a business or brand, UX is a vast field that requires a multidisciplinary approach and a skill set that is highly diverse to allow teams to react to a fast-paced and challenging environment.

The scope of UX design includes the consideration of every interaction and experience a user has with a product or service, such as:

• How easy it is to accomplish the desired task
• How the user feels when using the system

The job of a UX designer is to build a bridge between a business or organisation through the creation of a user experience that is easy to use. This is achieved through market analysis, product development and a clear design strategy that leads to a project outcome that meets user needs, requirements and expectations. To accomplish these goals UX is often split into the following main disciplines:

1. Experience Strategy (ExS): Holistic strategy that includes both customer and business needs
2. Interaction Design (IxD): Interactive elements of the system including buttons, page transitions etc.
3. User Research (UR): Identify the problems and designing a solution through research and user feedback
4. Information Architecture (IA): Understand the relationship between sets of content to organise information

This early development and design stages are extremely exciting as teams deploy the tools used in website design, these form the topics below:

• User Personas
• User Stories
• Scene Scenarios
• Storyboards

User Persona

User personas are created and used by UX designers to gain an understanding of the ideal customer by creating fictional representations. UX designers create user personas based on the research conducted on the needs, goals and patterns of behaviour observed from the target audience. Knowledge of the target users helps to guide designers and determine the required features and elements that must be incorporated into the design.

A persona helps designers clarify the target users by defining:

• Who the ideal customer is?
• What are the user’s behavioural patterns?
• What are the user needs and goals?
• What pain points do users face in the given context?

User Stories

User stories can be developed from the identified personas, they are a description of the type of user, who they are, what they want, and why they want it. User stories are written in natural language and are an informal tool to describe a feature from the perspective of the identified end-user.

User stories are a useful tool for development teams as they reduce the time spent drafting exhaustive documentation, instead, they allow the focus to stay on a customer-centric approach that is flexible enough to be used on both large and small scale projects. This flexibility comes from the simple and consistent format of the user stories, the more complex technical functions of the system can then be left to the developers, testers and systems architects.

There are several benefits to the creation of user stories, they support the delivery of an end product that users need, this is achieved by limiting detail too early in the development process that can cause developers to resist and explore multiple solutions. User stories also prevent developers from having a sense of false clarity, which is not possible to have at this stage of the development life cycle.

Scene Scenario

A scene scenario helps UX designers gain context and insight into how the user feels and what they want from the company website. By placing themselves in the user’s shoes can assist designers with the creation of a concise snapshot of user goals at that moment. Scene scenarios often include:

• The user
• The situation driver
• The specific task or goal they want to accomplish
• User information such as income and spending
• Path to complete the task
• Points of stress in the user experience or daily life

Storyboard

Storyboards help development teams to understand the human-computer interaction (HCI), which is important for both useability and to create an effective design for the graphical user interface (GUI).

Creating storyboards allows the design to be reviewed by stakeholders and users early in the design process, so feedback can be given, and changes made before expense has occurred in creating the deeper analysis and design elements or any physical build and programming.

The purpose of storyboarding is to develop a set of images that can be understood quickly by both technical and business users, these are not manuals so shouldn’t require lots of reading or an understanding of complex development terminology. The project team should consider:

• The ease of screen accessibility might be achieved through a menu function that allows users to quickly return to the main menu
• Consistency in screen layout and design including any action buttons or tabs
• Consider white space so items are easy to locate
• Meaningful and easy to understand screen titles
• Consideration made to font style, size, colour, and the appearance of the background to ensure that information is readable by the intended user
• Clear labelling of control or command buttons with appropriate labelling of symbols and images
• If controls or commands are not meant for general users, then access should be denied
• Measures to mitigate the entry of invalid data through quality and validation controls

References

8 Essential Characteristics of a User Persona for a Website. (n.d.). Blue Fountain Media. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/8-essential-characteristics-of-a-user-person

How to Define a User Persona. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/how-to-define-a-user-persona/

How to design user scenarios: Best practices and examples. (n.d.). Retrieved April 3, 2021, from https://www.justinmind.com/blog/how-to-design-user-scenarios/

How to Write a Good User Story: With Examples & Templates. (2018, July 20). Stormotion Blog. https://stormotion.io/blog/how-to-write-a-good-user-story-with-examples-templates/

Justinmind. (2017, July 31). User Personas, Scenarios, User Stories And Storyboards: What’s the Difference? Medium. https://uxplanet.org/user-personas-scenarios-user-stories-and-storyboards-whats-the-difference-cf00315f0799

What is User Story? (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://www.visual-paradigm.com/guide/agile-software-development/what-is-user-story/

What Is User Experience (UX) Design? Everything You Need To Know To Get Started. (n.d.). Retrieved April 10, 2021, from https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/what-is-user-experience-ux-design-everything-you-need-to-know-to-get-started/