Module 1,2 Flashcards
What is UX?
What it feels like to use a product or system
3 types of design that make up a great product
- Functional Design
- Aesthetic Design
- Experience Design
3 ingredients to a successful product
- Viability
- Feasibility
- Desirability
Viability in product terms
A product must make money or save money for a business
Feasibility
A product has to be buildable by your own technical team or an external team
Desirability
There has to be a need or a want for the product. It has to be solving a problem and make the users want to reuse the product.
How do you identify desirability
- Identify if there is a problem / need for the product
- Ensure the product is ACTUALLY solving a problem
- Ensure the product solves the problem in a way that creates a great experience for the user. A product cannot just solve the problem functionally.
4 steps in a high-level UX process
- Research
- Design
- Build
- Test.
3 main steps in design cycle before building the product
- Design
- Prototype
- Validate
Benefits of design process
- Creates a clear vision
- Easy to visualise product in high fidelity
- Ideas can be iterated more cheaply in the design stage than trying to make amendments are the build stage
Considerations when adding features
- Each new feature add complexity and makes it less intuitive
- Can make an interface become cluttered and crowd out important features.
- Features must be well designed for a product to be easy to use.
- Don’t add features for the sake of it, features should be limited to what is required.
Dangers of features
- Features add complexity
- Features must be designed - adding time and money to a product
- Features must serve a purpose and solve a genuine problem.
Problems with software development
- Too much focus on features and not on genuine user goals
- Failure to follow the proper design process
- Failure to produce high fidelity designs
- Failure to prioritise
A successful product must…
Solve a genuine problem and be better than the existing solutions.
Follow every step of the product development lifecycle.
A product must be designed with….
clear user goals in mind. A clearly defined vision.
Software projects commonly fail due to….
No research and no design.
This can lead to large cost and time overruns.
Benefits of low fidelity design
- Reduces ambiguity - creates a clear vision for all involved
- Allow for designs to be validated
- Reduces risk of product failure
A use case is a ….
potential way in which a user may use your product
An edge case is a ….
rare use case that does not happen frequently
A product designer must prioritise…
the most common use case. Features to facilitate this use case must be front and centre and stand out to user.
Edge cases must be given less priority in the design process.
Progressive disclosure…
Only give user the information and features as and when they need it. Do not overload them.
Rules for prioritising:
Focus on the things that most people do most often. The features must be the most prominent on the product
Design Target (3 most important things to know about your user when designing a product)
Goals
Context of use
Behaviours
Paradox of Specificity
Design for a small number of use cases. Less worked involved and a more specific product is created.
The cabin bag is an example of a product designed for a small number of uses cases but ended up having huge mass market appeal.
Users prefer simple products that are really good at just doing one thing well.
Mental model
A users idea of how a product should work.
The design model must match a user’s mental model.
When a user’s mental model and the design model of a product do not match, it leads to friction between the user and the product
The two types of research data are:
- Quantitative data
- Qualitative data
Quantitative data
Quantitative data is measurable in numbers and by graphs, producing statistical data
Structured, Numerical, measurable
Gives a broad insight
Objective
Examples of Quantitative Research
- Google Analytics
- A/B Testing
- Multiple choice survey questions
Qualitative data
Unstructured data, not measurable, provides good user’s insights
Subjective, interpretive
Smaller sample sizes
Examples of Qualitative Research
- Usability Testing
- Open-ended survey questions
- Focus groups
Remember …
You are not the target audience for your product!
You have too much bias and have too much expert knowledge of the product
Assumptions are…
dangerous!
Don’t assume your user knows everything you do. Assumptions need to be validated.
Less assumptions made means less risk.
Contextual inquiry is
observing real users using a product as the naturally would.
E.g A family using Heinz ketchup at home
Observational research…
is more powerful than listening to users talk about a product.
Shallow research leads to…
shallow insights.
In user research surveys…
avoid asking users opinions!
In surveys don’t ask
leading questions!
This leads to bias
Usability testing
the best way to assess the quality of user experience.
Better to observe than listen!
Benefits of usability testing
- It is the best way of assessing the quality of a user experience
- Presents products from the user’s perspective/view point
- Unites stakeholders behind a common cause
- Challenges / validates any assumptions that have been made
- Produce a variety of user research data
- Helps build a consensus about features amongst a product team
What can you learn from usability testing?
- What a user is trying to do (Primary, secondary and tertiary goals)
- What users do (behaviours)
- The context of use
- How the product is helping users achieve their goals
- How the product facilitates common behaviours
- Pain points in the product
- How our product compares to competitors
- Determine if the product is desirable through user’s reaction
Conversion rate
The percentage of users to a website that perform a specific task
e.g making a transaction or subscribing to a newsletter
Examples of test objectives
- Determine why conversion rates are below average
- Why people are dropping out during certain processes
- How we can speed up our booking process / checkout etc
- Determine why up-sell and cross-sell modules are under performing.
Benefits of online surveys
- Easy way to gather data
- Both quantitative and qualitative data obtained
- When a large number of people respond it’s a powerful tool
- Unambiguous (not subjective) - when well structured appropriate questions have been asked
- Cheap and easy to run
3 golden survey questions
- Why did you visit this website / use our app today?
You can learn goals from this - Were you able to complete your task today? If no, why?
Are people able to do what we want them to be able to do on our product - What improvements would you make to our website?
Best time to present survey on the website
- After the user has completed a couple of tasks
- At the end of the process e.g after checkout
DON’T ask your users to do something immediately
Likert Scale
Strongly disagree
Disagree
Neither agree nor disagree
Agree
Strongly agree
Survey advice
- Ask golden questions
- Never ask more than 10 questions
- Keep questions on one screen / page
- Don’t ask redundant questions - only ask genuinely useful questions
Depth Interviews are:
1-1 conversations with real users / target users
Depth interview objectives:
1.Understand user goals / problems
2. Understand context of use
What not to ask in depth interviews
- Product / design feedback
- Things they might do in the future or hypothetical questions
What to ask in depth interviews
- Ask about their lives and problems
- Ask about specific things they did in the past
Who you should conduct a stakeholder interview with
- Anyone with a stake in the project
- Anyone feeding requirements
- Anybody who provides sign off
Purpose of stakeholder interviews
- Determine what the business problems this product will solve
- Determine what business goals this product is expected to help us achieve
Objectives of a stakeholder interview
- Understand the business
- Understand the business goals
- Understand problems with the current product
- Understand the competitive landscape
- Build relationships with stakeholders
Stakeholder brief
- Write a summary after the meeting
- Focus on what was agreed
- Call out any contradictions for discussion
- Get it signed off after resolving contradictions
Benefits:
- Gives your project focus, clarity
- Shows stakeholders you are listening
- Can refer back to this document in times of back-out
Card Sorting
Participant organises content into groups that makes sense to them and gives the group a label
- more than one group
- no groups called “Other’ “Misc” allowed
Used to understand a user’s mental model
Benefits of card sorting
- Understand users mental models
- Understand users vocabulary and the terminology they use
- Gives you confidence - that the website or product will make sense to users as it is based off real user feedback
Closed card sort
Content groups are already labelled - this is used to test users mental models and that they sort the products into the expected categories
Used to validate / invalidate structure
A/B Testing
When 50% of users visit a site give show them Option A and when the other 50% visit show them Option B
After a certain amount of time has pasted, check to see which option had the greatest number of conversions
Multi-variant test
When two or more elements are changed
Check which individual elements / combinations produce the greatest results
e.g changing a button, image, CTA
Benefits of A/B testing
- Facilitates improvements, optimisation
- Encourages experiments
- Validates assumptions (or not)
- Data-driven design
Competitive Benchmarking
Reviewing competitors to:
- Understand how they are solving the user problem
- Understand what they are doing well so that we can emulate (copy)
- What are they not doing well that we could improve
- What conventions have been established that we need to follow
Categories
Before benchmarking decide what categories you want to focus on such as:
Homepage
Search and select
Entering details
(Airline Example)
Heuristics
Considered as
- General rules of thumb
- Characteristics of best practice
- Criteria to measure against (measure the quality of our product)
Heuristics: Software should be polite
- Software should be interest in me
- Software should be forthcoming
- Software should be self-confident
- Software should have common sense
Heuristics: Usability Heuristics
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- Freedom and control
- Recognition rather than recall
Heuristics: The reservoir of goodwill
- Don’t force me to do it your way
- Save me steps where possible
Heurisitc evaluation
Rate your software in terms of each of the heuristics, giving it a score out of 5 and adding in a comment where it fails to meet these standards
Software should be interested in me
Software should be personal
Software should know my name
Learn my preferences over time
Bad Example: Gmail doesn’t recognise my name or auto-suggest it at the end of your email
Gmail doesn’t recognise that you’ve sent emails to a friend outside your organisation multiple times - still raises alert that this account is outside of your org
Software should be forthcoming
Bad Example: ATM waited till after the user had selected €20 to tell that that there were no €20 notes available
ATM did not provide the reason why or tell the user what WAS available
- User should not have had the option select unavailable amounts
- ATM should have presented what options were available
Software should be self-confident
User should not be constantly presented with dialogue boxes asking the user if they are sure after they’ve completed an action e.g deleting a sheet from excel
Good Example: Google Drive - when a user has deleted something they are given an feedback confirming it has been deleted and an option discretely at the bottom of the screen to undo this
Software should be confident - not always assuming the user has made a mistake
Software should have common sense
E.g Irish Rail website doesn’t assume the user wants to collect their tickets from the station they are departing from
Visibility of system status
Software should indicate to the user what is going on / how far in a process it is
Good example: Gmail has “Sending…” appear at the top of the screen after the user has hit sent on an email followed by “Your message has been sent”
AppStore: shows a progress bar, download status and percentage of download
Software should provide user an indication of progress
Match between system and real world
- Don’t use terminology that users are not familiar with - system must use language the user can understand
- Don’t provide user with excess jargon
E.g receipt has too many data points (Gross tax etc) - confuses user by providing too much data
Freedom and Control
- If user makes mistakes - they should not be punished
Bad example: clicking the back button on a banking website - user gets kicked out of session for security reasons - user should have an option to go back without being removed from session. This is frustrating for the user
Goof example: User sheets allows user to undo an action e.g when they’ve deleted a file
- The software should never lead the user to a dead end - point where they cannot take any further action
Recognition rather than recall
User is more likely to recognise something than recall it
Don’t force your user to recall specific information
Example:
1. Provide a picture in a contact list - easier to recognise who to call
- Banking app: when viewing a specific account don’t just provide the 4 final digits, also provide a bank balance to make it easier for the user to recognise which is each account
Don’t force me your way
Important for a software to maintain/increase goodwill with the user
i.e don’t inconvenience the user for no good reason
Example: Don’t force the user to format data
Software should reformat it for the user
e.g formatting dates / phone number blank spaces
This will irritate user and diminish goodwill
Don’t waste my time
Saving user steps where possible with increase users goodwill with a software
Users are busy and multi-tasking - won’t give software 100% attention
Bad Example: Amazon - all credit card info and billing and delivery address info is all based in Ireland, yet when setting up a new delivery address Amazon defaults to the United Kingdom - user has to scroll through a long picker to select Ireland - takes time and many additional steps for the user to have to scroll through that list
E.g Otterbox UK setting address automatically to Andorra on the GB UK site
Good Example: Kayak booking app - automatically sets departure location to current location
Bad Example: FT times: doesn’t provide user with correct keyboard when entering email address
