What is User Experience? - Barcamp 4 in Auckland New Zealand

© 2010Haunani Pao, CUA [email protected] twitter:haunanipao Barcamp 4, 17, July 2010 1

By Haunani Pao, CUAUser Experience [email protected]

Barcamp 417 July 2010

What is User Experience?


In this document...

- What is User Experience?

- What is User Centric Design?

- What is Usability?

- What User Experience is NOT

- Appendix


What is User Experience?

“Information is that, which leads to understanding.”– Richard Saul Wurman, architect and graphic designer


What do people say?

- If you ask someone about UX, he might say:

- It has something to do with the UI of the software...

- It’s about usability...

- It’s about the colours and design...

- It’s positive and nice

- All of these examples are reasonable...but UX is more than that.


On the web, the experience is the brand…

It is the different touch points, whether they are tangible or intangible of the total experience.

“ Every time a customer comes into contact with an enterprise, through any of its channels, the customer has an opportunity to form an opinion – good, bad or indifferent. Over time, this collective set of customer experiences forms a picture in the customer’s mind, which ultimately forms the image of the brand and its values.”– Gartner, March 2002


UX is both “Art and Science”

User Experience is multi-disciplinary

with unique and diverse skills to design offerings that satisfy user expectations and business needs.

Human Factors

Ergonomics Information Architecture

Contextual Inquiry

Human-Computer InteractionHCI/CHI

Linguistics

Usability Testing

Visual Design

Interface Design

Interaction Design

Information Design

Business Analysis Conceptual Modeling

Heuristics

Cognitive Science & Psychology


- Advocate for all users- User is the center of the process- Brings objectivity in design decisions

needs goals tasks

needs goals strategy

user

business

Alignment of User and Business Goals

Its purpose of being


Elements of User Experience

To the user, the surface of the site or application is the UX. Beneath the skeleton, much thought for the UX comes from the structure, scope and abstraction of the strategy.


• Rigorous, Reusable, Repeatable

• Define and Refine Requirements

• Create Consistent Interfaces

• Improves Usability

UX is more than just a “pretty face”


What is User Centric Design?

“The two most important tools an architect has, are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.”

– Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect


User Centric Design (UCD)

It’s a design philosophy

It’s a multi-staged process

Designers test their assumptions and solutions

It focuses on the needs, goals and limitations of the user

Users are part of the design team


The User Centric Design process is Iterative

Evaluate and Assess

Usability Testing

Evaluate and Assess

Usability Testing

Technical Development

UX Quality Assurance

Technical Development

UX Quality Assurance

Build Deployment

1 4 52EvaluationDesign

3Analysis

Vision/Goals/Objectives

Challenges/Constraints

Conceptual Design

Functional Specs.

Design Walkthrough

Usability Testing

In each phase of the project, there are UCD activities and deliverables.


Contextual Inquiry

Task Analysis

User Centric Design Activities (examples)

Affinity Diagramming

Expert Review

Usability Testing


User Centric Design Artefacts (examples)

Process Flows Wireframes

Personas

Design Specification

Storyboards Usability ReportProject Plan


What is Usability?

"Modern user interfaces are just as complex as software in terms of the number of different variables we combine. More importantly, 20 years of usability engineering experience have shown that it's impossible to design the perfect user interface on the first try." – Jakob Nielsen


The important factors are:

- Effectiveness: How the user achieves the goals when using the system

- Efficiency: The resources consumed in order to achieve their goals

- Satisfaction: How the user feels about their use of the system

Factors of Usability


“The rule of thumb in many usability aware organizations is that the cost-benefits

ratio for usability is $1:$10-100. Once a system is in development, correcting a

problem costs 10 times as much as fixing the same problem in design. If the

system has been released, it costs 100 times as much relative to fixing in design.”

(Gilb, 1998)

Usability is smart business

• Increase ease of use

• Increase user satisfaction

• Increase productivity

• Reduce maintenance/enhancement costs

• Save development costs

• When done well, improves the brand

Users are savvy, sometimes you only have one chance to make an impact. Usability can differentiate you from your competition.


The ‘usability iceberg’

10% – visual design, aesthetics, colour, fonts, layout

30% – interaction with the look – buttons, etc

60% - The conceptual model. The relationship between objects, metaphors, workflow, navigation

The majority of usability issues with a system lies beneath the surface.


How UX and Usability are related

Think of User Experience as a Countdown Store:

• The building

• Park your car in the car park

• Shop for groceries (goal)

• Pay for groceries (task)

• The weekly advertisements

• The website

(Countdown is a grocery store chain in New Zealand)


How UX and Usability are related

Think of Usability as the efficiencies:

• The Trolley bay

• The layout of the store

• The wide aisles

• The arrangement of grocery items

• The efficiency of checkout

Self check out

Shallow or deep trolleys, or baskets


Remember…

The Experience is the brand


What User Experience is Not?


… it is not

Eye candy!


… or about paying …

… lip serviceto “user engagement”


... it is not

Optional.


When you make UX optional, you end up with this…

“Your best guess is not good enough…”Jakob Nielsen, Usability Expert

This is an example of a user experience without the UCD approach. It has all the requirements and visual design, but it’s not usable.


So to recap…

• User Experience is the result from an end-to-end multi-staged process using User Centric Design and validated by usability testing.

• It is based on research and understanding of the user’s needs and goals.

• It drives the functionality and design of a product from the ground up.


Thank You for your time.

Questions?


Appendix


Learn MoreWikipedia:

- Get the high level information on UX – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience

Websites:

- A List Apart – http://alistapart.com – this has more to do with web design, but there are topics on process as well

- Boxes and Arrows – http://boxesandarrows.com – one-stop shopping for UX and IA.

- Human Factors International – http://humanfactors.com – 30 years of UX and usability experience. Their site features UX communities, whitepapers, webcasts and news

Books:

- The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett, 2003

- Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug (one of my favourite books)

- Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman

Professional Associations:

- ACM/SIGCHI – http://sigchi.org

- ACM/SIGGRAPH – http://siggraph.org

- Usability Professionals Association (UPA) – http://upa.org and http://upa.org.nz

- Human Factors and Ergonomic Society (HFES) – http://hfes.org


References

- Thank you to:

- Elements of User Experience, 2000, Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, [email protected]

- Cover of The Design of Everyday Things, 1986, Donald A. Norman

- Iceberg Lifecycle, 2010, Vlad Gerasimov, http://vladstudio.com

- User Experience Stencil for Visio, 2009, Todd Zazelenchuk and Elizabeth Boling, http://userfocus.co.uk

- Countdown Stores: http://www.countdown.co.nz/

- Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience

- Richard Saul Wurman

- Frank Lloyd Wright

- Jakob Nielsen


Typical artefacts, tasks and deliverables1. Affinity Diagramming – a technique used to organize ideas and data.

2. Card Sorting – a technique with users to find patterns in how they would expect to find content or functionality.

3. Heuristic Expert Review - A detailed analysis of an application or Web site based on a list of predefined criteria.

4. High Value Scenarios - A set of the most critical and widely used user tasks in an application or Web site.

5. High-Fi Prototype - A branded and UI standards compliant screen mock up, usually of the lo-fi prototype and sometimes interactive.

6. Low-Fi Prototype - A screen mock up (usually paper) to illustrate the functionality, content, information architecture and preliminary page layout.

7. Process Flows - A visual mapping of a user process and each decision along the way, to achieve a task.

8. Quality Assurance – User Interface - is the process of looking through a site or application in code and design and checking it against the required

design specification.

9. Site Map - A Site Map is a diagram listing the various pages or page types throughout the site and the user paths to and from them (Information

Architecture).

10. Screen Flows - A visual representation of the relationship and navigability of screens within an application.

11. Task Analysis –any factors to complete a task, including length, manual, mental, external artifacts etc.

12. Usability Metrics - Metrics to determine how the interface can be measured on usability attributes.

13. Usability Report – Deliverable results from a Usability Testing

14. Usability Testing - Tests how users actually interact with a prototype or complete site to discover pros/cons of the site or application and make

recommendations for improvements.

15. User and Interface Design Requirements - defines the user and interface requirements for the site or application.

16. User Interviews - Interviews conducted to identify user requirements.

17. User Personas - A Persona is a document that contains one or more representations of target users.

18. UX Interface and Functional Specifications - The complete specification of all aspects of the user experience.

19. Wireframes- Collection of standard compliant screens complete with the core elements and functions, design, content and navigation in place.


UX Glossary- Business Analysis (BA) – identifying business needs and solutions to business problems

- Cognitive Psychology – study of memory, language, mental processing, perception, problem solving and thinking.

- Cognitive Science – study of how information is represented in the brain.

- Contextual Inquiry (CI) – One-on-one observation of a user and their daily routines, work process within their environment

- Ergonomics - is concerned with mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system.

- Heuristics – simple, gestalt, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems.

- Human Computer Interaction (HCI/CHI) – the study of interaction between people and computers

- Human Factors – understanding the properties of human capabilities

- Information Design – showing information in a visual manner so people can understand it and use it effectively.

- Interface Design – “the feel” of the system

- Information Architecture (IA)– is the art of expressing a model or concept of information, specifically used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.

- Interaction Design (IxD) – this describes the behaviour of components of a system to its users

- Mental Model – a user’s thought process and decision making when performing tasks in “real world” situations.

- Nomenclature – the language, naming convention and terminology internally related to a community, process, principle or procedure

- Usability Testing (UT)– one-on-one testing of a prototype with a user and use ‘think aloud protocol’ to gather their impressions of the prototype. Then incorporate the feedback to improve the design.

- User Centric Design (UCD) – a process where the user becomes part of the design team to identify users needs, goals and desires for a system or artifact.

- User eXperience (UX) – how a person feels about using a system

- Visual Design (VD) – “the look” of the system


Haunani has 10 years experience with User Experience (UX) and User Centric Design (UCD). In 2003, she received her Certified Usability Analysis (CUA) designation from Human Factors International.

She is an advocate and practitioner of the User Experience (UX) methodology as a designer, analyst and architect to provide human factors expertise and project deliverables such as expert reviews, information architecture, interaction design models and usability testing.

She works collaboratively for the successful definition and design of user experiences and applications.

Haunani is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, but moved to New Zealand for adventure and love. She’s a sketcher, gamer, foodie, world-traveller, beermaker and urban gardener.

Haunani Pao, CUAUser Experience [email protected]: haunanipaohttp://nz.linkedin.com/in/haunaniAuckland, New Zealand

About Haunani