Universal Principles and Methods of Design

Let’s start with Design Principles

Design principles are the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against to keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. They define and articulate the key characteristics of a project to stakeholders, clients, colleagues, and team members.

As your team aggregates design principles to help form decisions, keep a list of them as a reminder to everyone.

If time allows, explain why each of these design principles will be important to the design of the product to help stakeholders and clients not informed on design understand fully your design decisions.

Example:

According to XYZ, applying a design principle such as ABC has been proven to help people find items more quickly/relate/enjoy/more loyalty/etc. and will favor a site over your LMNOP competition.

AffordanceThe physical characteristics of an object or environment influences its function.

When the affordance of an object or environment corresponds with its intended function, the design will perform more efficiently and will be easier to use.

Allow users to feel smart because they know what an item should or shouldn’t do.

If you design the title of a website to look like a button – people will want to use it like a button.

Closure

A tendency to perceive a set of individual elements as a single, recognizable pattern, rather than multiple, individual elements.

The tendency to perceive a pattern as a single element they will fill in the missing information to complete the pattern.

This is one principle is of the Gestalt principles of perception

http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm

Immersion

A state of mental focus so intense thatawareness of the “real” world is lost, generally resulting in a feeling of joy and satisfaction.

Ockham’s Razor

Given a choice between functionally equivalent designs, the simplest design should be selected.

Unnecessary elements decrease a design’s efficiency, and increase the probability of unanticipated consequences.

Recognition over Recall

Memory for recognizing things is better than memory for recalling things.

Recognition memory is obtained through exposure, and does not necessarily involve any memory about origin, context, or relevance. It is simply memory that something (senses) has been experienced before. Recall memory is obtained through learning, usually involving some combination of memorization, practice, and application.

Storytelling

A method of creating imagery, emotions, and understanding of events through an interaction between storyteller and audience.

Setting – orient users with time and place.Characters – allow the user to identify with the product

through “characters”.Plot – ties the story together.Invisibility – existence of the medium should be

forgotten once the user is engaged.Mood – emotional tone of product.Movement – everything flows together.

Good storytelling generally requires fundamental elements

80/20Also known as Pareto Principle

A high percentage of effects in any largesystem are caused by a low percentage ofvariables.If the critical 20% of a product’s features are used 80% of the time, design and testing resources should focus primarily on those features.

80% of a product’s usages involves 20% of its features

80% of a company’s revenue comes from

20% of its products

80% of errors are caused by 20% of its components

Design Methods

Methods can help facilitate conversations to help us better understand and empathize with people, and as a result build more meaningful products.

Methods can help designers have the right conversation at the right time. Also, helps designers learn which methods to use at the correct time during their research.

Methods help the team members work together to discover solutions to a problem.

You can’t say you practice User Experience if you don’t use methods to help guide your design decisions.

Contextual Inquiry

An immersive, contextual method of Observing and interviewing that reveals underlying (and invisible) work structure.

4 principles that define Contextual Inquiry:

Context: spend time where work happens.

Partnership: Master/Apprentice relationship model.

Interpretation: From the data gathered the researcher (you) Make a hypothesis (or interpretation) of the data and what that means to the participant. This is then followed by other methods for testing the interpretation.

Focus: Researcher must learn to expand the limits of their focus to see the participant’s world.

Affinity Diagramming

A process used to externalize and meaningfullyCluster observations and insights from research, keeping design teams grounded in data as they design.

Contextual Inquiry: Write observations on sticky notes. Can then interpret the notes and the significance of each. Can then cluster together similar notes.

Usability Testing: Different color sticky notes for each participant. During Usability Test observers should write notes about participant on sticky note. Common issues and problems should emerge.

Heuristic Evaluation

Rather than making design decisions based on intuition and personal preferences, a set of manageable and meaningful principles can focus the team’s efforts regarding the types of changes to fix.

Want more than one person to perform the Heuristics and a range of knowledge levels from beginner to expert.

An agreed-upon set of usability best practices can help detect usability problems before actual users are brought in to further evaluate an interface.

Think-Aloud Protocol

A method that requires participants to verbalize what they are doing and thinking as they complete a task, revealing aspects of an interface that delight, confuse, and frustrate.

Try to evaluate specific tasks and not an entire product.Don’t want to mentally exhaust the participant.

Concurrent and Retrospective think-aloud:

Concurrent – participant speaks out loud while performingThe task. They should comment on what is happening and not why.

Retrospective – participant speaks about the task after performingit while watching themselves on tape.

Usability TestingFocuses on people and their tasks, and seeks empirical evidence (information that is acquired by observation or experimentation) about how to improvethe usability of an interface.

This method is designed to help teams identify the parts of an interface that most regularly frustrate and confuse People so that they can be prioritized, fixed, and retested prior to launch.

Tests are designed around tasks and scenarios that represent typical end-user goals. The tasks and scenarios should not influence the participant to solve a problem a certain way, or seek to justify your design decisions.

Some errors and highlights the observers and evaluators should try to detect are:

Can’t complete task in reasonable amount of time.Gives up or resigns from completing process.Expresses surprise or delight.Expresses frustration, confusion, or blames themselves.Makes a suggestion for the interface of flow of events.Understands the goal, but tries a different approach than

expected to complete the task.

Book Recommendations

Resources Used

http://www2.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dmg/tools/user/contextual.html

http://www.questionablemethods.com/2011/11/heuristic-evaluation-no-users-required.html

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ianlin/professional.html

http://www.behance.net/gallery/THINK-ALOUD-IIT-Bombay-Library-Information-kiosks/3416091

http://www.lib.washington.edu/usability/resources/guides/tests

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/v45_n1/newins.html

http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm