How to Build Your First UX Design From Start to Finish Pt.1: Empathize & Define

Question 1

So as to be able to apply the Design Thinking process in the design of great user experiences, the UX designer must…

Answer 1

Become familiar with all of the tools and techniques for each phase and be prepared to adapt them to the needs of the project at hand.

Question 2

What is the general flow of interaction design process?

Answer 2

1. What user needs/wants
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Prototype
5. Implement and Deploy

Question 3

Iterative design is common for interactive systems because…?

Answer 3

Designers never get it right the first time.

Question 4

What is the first stage of an interaction design process?

Answer 4

Requirements – finding out about people and what they want

Question 5

Design is…?

Answer 5

Achieving goals within constraints.

Question 6

What is the hardest part of the design process when your time and budget are limited?

Answer 6

Deciding which problems to solve

Question 7

If we are to empathize with users, we should always try to adopt the mindset of a

Answer 7

beginner

Question 8

As design thinkers, we should do our best to leave our own _______ within us.

Answer 8

assumptions

Question 9

What?
How?
Why?

Answer 9

What”, we record the details (not assumptions) of what has happened.
In “How”, we analyze how the person is doing what he/she is doing (is he/she exerting a lot of effort? Is that individual smiling or frowning?).
In “Why”, we make educated guesses regarding the person’s motivations and emotions.

Question 10

What are extreme users?

Answer 10

Users that are unlikely to use your product or are far from your demographic.

Question 11

What is the purpose of engaging with extreme users?

Answer 11

It’s not to develop solutions for those users, but to sieve out problems that mainstream users might have trouble voicing.

Question 12

Why should a design team share their inspiring stories?

Answer 12

Each person in a design team will collect different pieces of information, have different thoughts, and come up with different solutions. For this reason, you should share your inspiring stories to collect all of the team members’ research, from field studies, interviews, etc. By sharing the stories that each member has observed, the team can get up to speed on progress, draw meaning from the stories, and capture interesting details of the observation work.

Question 13

Engaging with extreme users allows us to empathize with users because:

Answer 13

Extreme users tend to voice problems that mainstream users feel but have a problem explaining.

Question 14

Assuming a beginner’s mindset is important when trying to empathize with users because:

Answer 14

It allows us to drop our assumptions and observe with a fresh pair of eyes.

Question 15

Why are interviews a great way to emphasize with your users?

Answer 15

Interviews can give you an in-depth understanding of the users’ values, perceptions, and experiences.

Question 16

User interviews are often referred to

Answer 16

semi-structured interviews

Question 17

What are semi-structured interviews?

Answer 17

Structured in that you prepare a set of topics you would like to cover during the interview, but still open enough that you can follow leads in the conversation and change the order of topics.

Question 18

What are the advantages of a semi-structured interviews?

Answer 18

The advantage of the semi-structured interview approach is that you can define a predetermined set of topics that you know to be relevant to your project before you conduct the interview, but you can also explore topics that you had not previously thought relevant.

Question 19

When are User-interviews often conducted?

Answer 19

The exploration phase of a design project, before a clear concept has been defined or before a major redesign.

Question 20

Why shouldn’t you expect your participants in a user interview to give you an answer on the precise steps they normally go through when they make a grocery list?

Answer 20

It can be difficult for users to tell you how they use products or perform everyday activities, because they may not remember or they don’t know.

Question 21

What are personas?

Answer 21

Representations of our users, who represent the goals, behaviors and motivations of real users.

Question 22

T or F: Each primary persona requires a different user interface.

Answer 22

True

Question 23

What are design research personas mostly focused on?

Answer 23

User needs and behaviors

Question 24

What are Market segment personas mostly focused on?

Answer 24

Market segments and demographics

Question 25

What is a customer journey map?

Answer 25

It is a research-based tool.
It examines the story of how a customer relates to the business, brand or product over time.
They give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers.

Question 26

Why are customer journey maps useful even beyond the UX design and marketing teams?

Answer 26

• Helps facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels.start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business.
• They may also be employed to educate stakeholders as to what customers perceive when they interact with the business.

Question 27

a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination is a

Answer 27

customer journey map. Entire arc of engagement

Question 28

What Do You Need to Do to Create a Customer Journey Map?

Answer 28

• User-personas. If you can’t tell a typical user’s story, how will you know if you’ve captured their journey?
• A timescale. Customer journeys can take place in a week, a year, a lifetime, etc., and knowing what length of journey you will measure before you begin is very useful indeed.
• A clear understanding of customer touchpoints. What are your customers doing and how are they doing it?
• A clear understanding of the channels in which actions occur. Channels are the places where customers interact with the business – from Facebook pages to retail stores. This helps you understand what your customers are actually doing.
• An understanding of any other actors who might alter the customer experience. For example, friends, family, colleagues, etc. may influence the way a customer feels about any given interaction.
• A plan for “moments of truth” – these are the positive interactions that create good feelings in customers and which you can use at touchpoints where frustrations exist.
• Review Organization Objectives – what are your goals for this mapping exercise? What organizational needs do you intend to meet?
• Review Current User Research – the more user research you have at your fingertips, the easier this exercise will be. Be creative, and if you don’t have the right research to define the journey, then consider how you can carry that research out.
• Review Touchpoints and Channels – the next step is to ensure that you effectively map touchpoints and channels. A touchpoint is a step in the journey where the user interacts with a company or product, and a channel is the means by which the user does this. So, for example, a touchpoint could be “pay this invoice” and channels could be “online”, “retail”, “over the phone”, “mail”, etc. It can also help to brainstorm at this stage and see if there are any touchpoints or channels you’ve missed in your original data collection exercise.
• Create an Empathy Map. An empathy map examines how the customer feels during each interaction – you want to concentrate on how the customer feels and thinks as well as what he/she will say, do, hear, etc. in any given situation.
• Build an affinity diagram. The idea here is first to brainstorm around each concept you’ve touched on and then to create a diagram which relates all these concepts, feelings, etc. together. This is best achieved by grouping ideas in categories and labeling them. You can eliminate concepts and the like which don’t seem to have any impact on customer experience at this stage, too.
Sketch the customer journey. How you do this is up to you; you can build a nice timeline map that brings together the journey over the course of time. You could also turn the idea into a video or an audio clip or use a completely different style of diagram. The idea is simply to show the motion of a customer through touchpoints and channels across your time frame and how that customer feels about each interaction on that journey. The map should include the outputs of your empathy map and affinity diagram.
• Iterate and produce. Then, take your sketches and make them into something useful; keep refining the content and then produce something that is visually appealing and useful to stakeholders, team members, etc. Don’t be afraid to rope in a graphic designer at this stage if you’re not good at making things look awesome.
• Distribute and utilize. The journey map serves no purpose sitting on your hard drive or in your desk drawer – you need to get it out there to people and explain why it’s important. Then, it needs to be put to use; you should be able to define KPIs around the ideal journey, for example, and then measure future success as you improve the journey.

Question 29

T or F: Customer journey maps need to include users’ emotions during all steps in the map because they can highlight opportunities to better serve the users during their experience.

Answer 29

True

Question 30

Case studies for your UX portfolio should be written as…

Answer 30

soon as possible after the end of the UX project