CSUE1000 Fundamentals of UX Design - Study Guide

Question 1

What is UX Design?

Answer 1

UX Design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and a product. User experience (UX) refers to the emergent experience that occurs when people interact with a system.

Question 2

What is Usability?

Answer 2

Usability is a quality attribute of the UI, covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth.

Question 3

List a sublet discipline of UX - User Centred Design

Answer 3

User-centred design (UCD) is an approach of carrying out a design process that considers the end-user to be the heart of the project.

Question 4

List a sublet discipline of UX Design - Customer Experience Design

Answer 4

Customer Experience Design is the practice of designing products/services with the focus on the quality and thoughtfulness of the user experience. Where UxD deals with users at one touchpoint, CxD deals with users at multiple touchpoints.

Question 5

List a sublet discipline of UX Design - Human Computer Interaction

Answer 5

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a design field that focuses on the interactions between people and computers. HCI incorporates multiple disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, human factors, and ergonomics, into one field.

Question 6

What did Fredrick Taylor do?

Answer 6

Frederick Taylor wrote the Seminal 1919 book “The Principles of Scientific Management” (His work was instrumental in the creation of a branch of engineering called “industrial engineering”).

Question 7

What did Paul Fitts do?

Answer 7

Paul Fitts contributed to the design of modern aircraft cockpits, significantly reducing pilot errors and fatal plane crashes after WWII. He also created Fitt’s Law: a predictive model which states the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target.

Question 8

What did the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) do?

Answer 8

The Palo Alto Research Centre gave us Ethernet (1973), the Graphical user interface (1975) and Multi-user virtual world (1990).

Question 9

What is the Nielson Norman group?

Answer 9

The Nielsen Norman Group is an American computer user interface and user experience consulting firm, founded in 1998 by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman.

Question 10

Explain a role in the UX project-ecosystem - Business Analyst

Answer 10

A business analyst is responsible for: • identifying key business stakeholders • driving the requirements-gathering process • serving as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and the technology team

Question 11

Explain a role in the UX project-ecosystem - Content Strategist

Answer 11

A content strategist is responsible for: • understanding business and user requirements for content in various media (articles, documents, photos, and video) • identifying gaps in existing content • facilitating the workflow and development of new content

Question 12

Explain a role in the UX project-ecosystem - Visual Designer

Answer 12

A visual designer is responsible for the elements of the site or application that the user sees • Designing a look and feel that creates an emotional connection with the user that’s in line with the brand guidelines

Question 13

What are Gestalt Principles?

Answer 13

Gestalt Principles are principles/laws of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects.

Question 14

Explain the basics of human Cognition and Psychology and how it applies to user experience design.

Answer 14

According to the cognitive science-based guidelines, human memory limitations, attention, learning, decision making, and perception had to be taken into account when designing an effective Graphical User Interface (GUI).

If you are entering treatment with a cognitive psychologist, one of the first things you will be asked to do is identify your problems and formulate specific goals for yourself, and then you will be helped to organize your problems in a way that will increase the chances of meeting your goals — and that’s exactly what designers generally do (or should do).

Question 15

What is UX Strategy?

Answer 15

UX strategy is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty. It’s the vision of a solution that needs to be validated with real potential customers to prove that it’s desired in the marketplace. The big picture.

Question 16

What is discovery research?

Answer 16

A discovery is a preliminary phase in the UX-design process that involves researching the problem space, framing the problem(s) to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next.

Question 17

Common Activities in Discoveries - Stakeholder Interviews

Answer 17

Stakeholder Interviews - Interviewing stakeholders provides an additional layer of insight that helps the team understand the scale of the problem and also the viability of later solutions.

Question 18

What is the Kano Model?

Answer 18

The Kano Model is a tool teams use to make design decisions. It enables teams to plan design better by prioritizing features based on their expected impact on customer satisfaction.

Question 19

What are the core tenets of the Kano model?

Answer 19

1. Value attracts customers,
2. Quality keeps customers and builds loyalty,
3. Innovation is necessary to differentiate and compete in the market.

Question 20

The Five Categories of the Kano Model: Thresholds

Answer 20

Thresholds are features that users expect such as having brakes in a car or hot water in a hotel’s shower.

Therefore they don’t get very excited about them.
From a customer’s perspective, threshold features are either present or not. They have a binary effect on satisfaction: if users expect a certain capability and it does not work — they will get frustrated, but when working well, it will not delight them. Such features can at most reach a neutral satisfaction.

Question 21

The Five Categories of the Kano Model: Performance Features

Answer 21

Performance Features
are those which 1) are carefully evaluated by the customer and taken into consideration when making a purchase, 2) will increase your customer’s satisfaction the better you implement them. These are functionalities such as battery life or storage space.

If excelled, performance features increase satisfaction proportionally.

Question 22

The Five Categories of the Kano Model: Excitement Features

Answer 22

Excitement features also referred to exciters or delighters, embody the unexpected. Users do not anticipate them. Therefore we bring delight by over-delivering and performing the unordinary.

These type of features don’t result in dissatisfaction when missing, however, if executed well, may cause user over-excitement with the product (and possibly encourage a word-of-mouth recommendation).

Question 23

The Five Categories of the Kano Model: Indifferent Features

Answer 23

As the name suggests, indifferent features don’t evoke any feelings in the customers regardless for their presence or absence.

At times we can make the right features answering the right problem yet make them too complicated for users to understand. In consequence, they can be indifferent to the customers as their value is not apparent to them.

Question 24

The Five Categories of the Kano Model: Reverse Features

Answer 24

The feature is considered to be a reverse one when its absence brings customers’ satisfaction, and its presence results in dissatisfaction.

A small example of this type of quality was Microsoft’s little “paperclip helper”. Most people didn’t like it and it was even more annoying because it was difficult to turn off unless you knew the secret to disabling it.

Question 25

What are personas?

Answer 25

Personas are documents that describe typical target users. Well-crafted personas are often built on empathy. Personas must be supported by research

Question 26

What are the six pieces of key information required in a persona?:

Answer 26

1. photo
2. age
3. name
4. location
5. occupation
6. biography

Question 27

Argument against Personas

Answer 27

Many practitioners in the user experience design world do not believe that personas do a good job of articulating the needs, goals, and attitudes of users. They believe that personas can hinder creativity, innovation, or good
design for any number of reasons.

Question 28

Argument in support of Personas

Answer 28

Other practitioners believe that personas meet a specific need that influences the design process in a very positive way-when they are based on solid research data and mixed with a dose of personalized reality. Which side of the coin you land on is entirely up to you.

Question 29

What is research ethics?

Answer 29

Research ethics is the careful consideration of the rights, well-being, and dignity of people involved in research activities - definition by Nielson Norman group.

Question 30

What is Accessibility?

Answer 30

Accessibility is concerned with whether all users are able to access an equivalent user experience, however they encounter a product or service (e.g., using assistive devices). Unlike usability, accessibility focuses on people with disabilities.

Question 31

Types of Accessibility Issues

Answer 31

1. Visual (e.g., color blindness)
2. Motor/mobility (e.g., wheelchair-user concerns)
3. Auditory (hearing difficulties)
4. Seizures (especially photosensitive epilepsy)
5. Learning/cognitive (e.g., dyslexia

Question 32

What is Information Architecture?

Answer 32

Information architecture (IA) is a science of organizing and structuring content of the websites, web and mobile applications, and social media software.

Question 33

What is interaction design?

Answer 33

Interaction design is the design of the interaction between users and products. The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible. The interaction between a user and a product often involves elements like aesthetics, motion, sound, space

Question 34

What is visual design?

Answer 34

Visual design aims to improve a design’s/product’s aesthetic appeal and usability with suitable images, typography, space, layout and color. Visual design is about more than aesthetics.

Question 35

What are heuristics?

Answer 35

Heuristics can be thought of as rules of thumb. A heuristic evaluation or expert review of a web or mobile site is based on a set of predetermined heuristics or qualitative guidelines.

Question 36

Visibility of system status

Answer 36

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

Question 37

Match between system and the real world

Answer 37

The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.

Question 38

Consistency and standards

Answer 38

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

Question 39

Recognition rather than recall

Answer 39

Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

Question 40

What is Design Thinking?

Answer 40

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Question 41

Design thinking stage 1: Empathize

Answer 41

Here, you should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, typically through user research.

Question 42

Design thinking stage 2: Define

Answer 42

Here you analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified.

Question 43

Design thinking stage 3: Ideate

Answer 43

Here, you generate ideas.

Question 44

Design thinking stage 4: Prototype

Answer 44

Here you produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product

Question 45

Design thinking stage 5: Test

Answer 45

Here, Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes.

Question 46

What is a design sprint?

Answer 46

A Design Sprint is a unique five day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers using the Design thinking stages.

Question 47

What do you need to run a Design Sprint?

Answer 47

1. A decider. They call the shots. Whether that’s the CEO or senior executive.
2. Facilitator. The time keeper. They keep track of the team’s progress during the Design Sprint and ensure that everyone is playing their part.
3. Marketing expert. The person who is skilled at crafting your company’s messaging to your customers.
4. Customer service. They interact with your customers on a regular basis and truly understand who your users are.
5. Design expert. They design the product and help to realise the vision of the goal.
6. Tech expert. They are in the best position to understand what your company can build and deliver.
7. Financial expert. They can explain how much the project will cost and how much the company can expect to get from it in return.

Question 48

What is an iterative design process?

Answer 48

An iterative design process is one in which prototypes are tested and amended until teams feel that they have created the best possible product for release to the market.

Question 49

What is the value of an iterative design process?

Answer 49

Iterative design allows designers to create and test ideas quickly. Those that show promise can be iterated rapidly until they take sufficient shape to be developed; those that fail to show promise can quickly be abandoned.

Question 50

What is lean UX?

Answer 50

Lean UX is a design management system built to help create well-designed products through frequent collaboration between teams, constant iteration, and frequent contact with your users.

At the heart of Lean UX is the idea of radical transparency. Each team needs to communicate to one another their findings often in order to address any roadblocks and do the work needed to deliver a product quickly

Question 51

List the available sketching, wireframing and prototype tools available to user experience designers - Figma

Answer 51

Figma is the industry standard drawing and prototyping tool for creating visual mockups for the purpose of user experience design.

Question 52

List the available sketching, wireframing and prototype tools available to user experience designers - Axure

Answer 52

Axure is slightly less capable than Figma when considering its digital illustration functionality, but it can create extremely sophisticated and highly interactive prototypes, complete with micro-interactions and conditional logic. If the budget is available, then Figma and Axure can be used together through the use of a Figma plugin. Figma is used to illustrate the designs, which can then be passed into Axure to prototype them.

Question 53

What is usability testing?

Answer 53

In a usability-testing session, a researcher asks a participant to perform tasks, usually using one or more specific user interfaces. While the participant completes each task, the researcher observes the participant’s behavior and listens for feedback.

Question 54

Explain the importance of Usability testing.

Answer 54

Usability testing helps in:

1. Identifying problems in the design of the product or service
2. Uncovering opportunities to improve
3. Learning about the target user’s behavior and preferences

Question 55

Explain the different types of user testing and the situations and reasons for applying each type - Guerilla testing

Answer 55

Guerilla testing is the simplest form of usability testing. Guerrilla testing means going into a public place such as a coffee shop to ask people about your prototype. Test participants are chosen randomly.

Guerilla testing works best in the early stages of the product development process when you want to know whether you’re moving in the right direction or not.

Question 56

Explain the different types of user testing and the situations and reasons for applying each type - Contextual inquiry

Answer 56

Contextual inquiry interview/observation method in which participants (real users) are first asked a set of questions about their experience with a product and then observed and questioned while they work in their own environments.

Getting all this information at the beginning of the design collaboration process will help the product team design a well-tailored experience.

Question 57

Explain the different types of user testing and the situations and reasons for applying each type - Card sorting

Answer 57

Card sorting is a method in which a moderator places concepts (content, features) on cards and allow test participants to manipulate the cards into groups and categories. Participants are then asked to explain their logic (to understand the reasoning).

Question 58

“Design is about the customer, not the user.”

Answer 58

Designer John Maeda on the importance of articulating and presenting designs.