User Experience: The Beginner's Guide

Question 1

What do you have to make sure the product or service you’re offering actually addresses?

Answer 1

We need to make sure that the product or service that you’re offering actually addresses the need of the user in the first place.

Question 2

Break this sentence into 2 parts, and explain the 2 parts: A person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.”

Answer 2

We can break this definition into two parts:

1. A person’s perceptions and responses
2. The use of a product, system or service

In user experience, we, as designers, do not have much control over a person’s perceptions and responses — the first part of the definition. For example, we cannot control how someone feels, moves their fingers or controls their eyes as they use a product (yet). What we can control is how the product, system or service behaves and looks — the second part of the definition.

“One cannot design a user experience, only design for a user experience. In particular, one cannot design a sensual experience, but only create the design features that can evoke it.”

Question 3

The simplest way to think about user experience design is as a verb and a noun. What is the verb and what is the noun?

Answer 3

A UX designer designs (verb) — ideates, plans, changes — the things that affect the user experience (noun) — perceptions and responses to a system or service.

Question 4

User experience design is a broad term that includes how everything in the world around us is designed, however, in common usage, UX design is used in connection with the design of what?

Answer 4

Software and Computer Systems.

A UX designer attempts to answer the question: “How can we make the experience of interacting with a computer, a smartphone, a product, a service as intuitive, smooth, and pleasant as possible?

Question 5

What is the origin of modern UX design?

Answer 5

HCI (Human-Computer Interaction.

Early HCI practitioners mostly had a background in computer science and cognitive psychology. As the field of HCI grew, designers realized that designing intuitive computers required a greater understanding of other fields. Over the years, UX design has borrowed principles and methods from various disciplines such as industrial design and anthropology.

Question 6

What does it mean when we say a user’s experience is abstract

Answer 6

It’s not tangible; it’s felt.

Question 7

Why is UX Design so important?

Question 8

ISO 9241 mentions three aspects of user-centered design: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. In the past, which two were quoted most often?

Answer 8

ISO 9241 mentions three aspects of user-centered design. In the past, designers focused primarily on effectiveness and efficiency. The third factor, satisfaction, was often in the background. Now, however, satisfaction is considered one of the most important aspects of UX design. A product that makes users feel good will generate repeat usage and purchases and hence is important from a business point of view.

Question 9

What is Jesse James Gerrett’s 5 planes of Strategy?

Answer 9

Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, Surface

1. Strategy: User needs & product objectives
2. Scope: Features & Content Requirements
3. Structure: Interaction Design & Information Architecture
4. Skeleton: Information, Interface & Navigation Design
5. Surface: VIsual Design

(At the bottom of the stack is the most abstract plane — Strategy. As we move up each plane, we become less abstract and more visible. The topmost plane is the Surface, which is the most visible or concrete aspect of UX design.)

Question 10

Design is a fluid activity, and you must mentally prepare yourself to adapt to changes — internal, external, known and unknown

Question 11

What is a Persona?

Answer 11

A fictional character that the designers build as a sort of user stereotype. It represents the typical users, their goals, motivations, frustrations, and skills.

Other information such as demographics and educational backgrounds complete the persona. Depending on the scope of the projects, designers will generate a number of different personas to capture as wide a part of the audience as possible. Generating personas helps designers empathize with the users and demonstrate a thorough understanding of who they are and what they want to achieve.

Question 12

What is a Storyboard?

Answer 12

An idea borrowed from the movie industry. It essentially consists of a comic strip, outlining the user’s actions and circumstances under which these are performed. The power of this idea is that it doesn’t only demonstrate what the user does, but also reveals the environment, which might be affecting how or why the user does something.

A storyboard helps visualize the users’ actions and also the environment in which they take place. While mostly used for empathizing with the users, storyboards can also be used to help illustrate alternatives in interaction design.

Question 13

What is a Customer Journey?

Answer 13

A customer journey map is a diagram that represents the steps (i.e., the process) taken by a user to meet a specific goal. By laying the process out along a timeline, designers can understand the changes in the user’s context, and their motivations, problems and needs along the way. By identifying the major stumbling blocks for users, the designers can better relate to their problems and begin to see where a product or service might fit along the way to help the user.

Question 14

What is Brainstorming?

Answer 14

Brainstorming is a process whereby a team of designers generates ideas about how to address the issues and opportunities identified in the user research phase. The concept here hinges on the generation of as many ideas as possible (even if they are completely wild) so that the designers can later sift through these and reduce them to the ideas that seem most promising. A central point is that the team members are free to explore all angles and realms; indeed, the best solutions can sometimes sprout from the craziest-sounding notions.

Question 15

What is Content Strategy?

Answer 15

Content strategy is the practice and process of ensuring that content is written, published, edited, repurposed and archived at the right time, and for the appropriate audience.

Content strategy is extremely important if you’re working on a product that is content-heavy, such as an online magazine. It is also relevant for non-publication-oriented products. In a fiercely competitive market, digital marketers often rely on content to increase traffic (that’s marketing-speak for potential users). Your users will likely see marketing communication and content before interacting with your product, thus setting expectations. As a UX designer, you may not be directly involved in creating a content strategy, but you must work closely with the person (or team) who works on it, to ensure the communication matches your design.

Question 16

What are Sitemaps?

Answer 16

You might have come across sitemaps while browsing different sites. Like physical maps, they help you find your way through a website. UX designers often create similar sitemaps to show the hierarchy and navigation structure of a website or an application. Such maps are often produced for mobile apps as well. They show how the content will be organized into logical “screens” or sections, and how the user may transition from one section of your service to another.

Question 17

What are User Flows?

Answer 17

A user flow (also known as a task flow) diagram is a simple chart outlining the steps that a user has to take with your product or service in order to meet a goal. In contrast to the customer journey map, the user flow diagram considers only what happens with your product (that is to say, ignoring all external factors). These diagrams can help designers quickly evaluate the efficiency of the process needed to achieve a user goal and can help pinpoint the “how” (i.e., execution) of the great ideas identified through brainstorming.

Question 18

What is a Wireframe?

Answer 18

An example wireframe brings together structure, navigation, information architecture, layout details, and more. Designers rely on hand-drawn sketches, sitemaps, and user flows to create a wireframe. They can be an intermediary step between sketches and prototypes.

Good wireframing is the skill of creating lean layouts so your team and stakeholders can quickly determine if concepts are worth developing. They are typically grayscale and do not include visual or branding elements.

Question 19

What is a Prototype?

Answer 19

A prototype is a simulation of the product or solution you want to build. It is an early version of a product or feature with which people can interact. Prototypes allow you to bring your idea closer to life before investing time and energy in building the real thing. You can test your idea with real people to identify friction points and iterate on your design — without having to write a single line of code. Common types of prototypes include low-fidelity and high-fidelity.

Question 20

What is a Low-Fidelity Prototype?

Answer 20

A low-fidelity prototype omits any visual design details and serves as a rough guide to allow designers to get a feel of how and where they should place content. Low-fidelity prototypes can start as hand-drawn sketches (which are great, because they are fast and cheap to produce, so you can easily throw them away if you change your mind) and later refined as computer-drawn wireframes, which are more faithful to the presentation of information on a real screen, but still lacking visual design details.

Question 21

What is a High-Fidelity Prototype?

Answer 21

A high-fidelity prototype is a step up from a low-fidelity prototype. They are often called pixel-perfect prototypes because they try to show all the visual and typographic design details of a product, as it would be shown on a real screen. They take into consideration physical screen dimensions and are produced in a size that corresponds to the physical device’s size. Although these require a lot more time to produce compared with low-fidelity prototypes, they are often the type of illustration that you would want to show to a customer or stakeholder.

Question 22

What is Information Design?

Answer 22

The information that you present on an interface plays a significant role in guiding the user and helping them accomplish their goals. Information can refer to text, as well as audio-visual elements, such as animated gifs, explainer videos and voice-overs.

Question 23

What is Information Architecture and Interaction Design?

Answer 23

The information architecture is analogous to the blueprint of a house. Larger UX teams might have specialist information, architects and interaction designers, while in smaller teams, UX designers will likely perform these roles.

Designers often use different types of flowcharts to visualize the information and interactions, such as sitemaps and user flows.

e.g) Sitemaps, User Flows

Question 24

What is UX Writing/Microcopy

Answer 24

UX writing is the practice of choosing the words people see when they interact with software, an app, or a website. This specialized writing is about designing the conversation between a digital product and the person using it. From the heading text on each screen and button labels to the navigation menu items and error messages, all the text on the interface of an application falls under the term microcopy or UX writing.

Whenever you use an app or a website, you encounter microcopy. It may not have been done by a UX writer, but those word cues are important for a positive user experience. True to its name, when the microcopy is doing its job well, you don’t even notice it — just like good UX!

In large software companies and digital agencies, you might have help from dedicated UX writers. UX writing is sometimes bundled into the work of content strategists. In most cases, however, UX writing is part of a UX designer’s role.

Question 25

What is Visual Design?

Answer 25

Users form their first impressions typically in 50 milliseconds. The surface of the product (often the visual design) is one of the first elements that users of your product or service will see. It is, however, often the last detail added to a product. This is because the visuals (and sounds) depend on all the decisions taken beneath the surface. Any changes to the layout, navigation, copy, etc. have a cascading effect on the surface layer.

Question 26

What are Mockups?

Answer 26

Even though mockups look like screenshots from a completed, real app, they are little more than images. Unfortunately, many clients seem to believe that at this stage, you must be really close to actually finishing the whole project, so be careful to make it abundantly clear that these are little more than good-looking visuals with no code behind them!

Mockups are fully polished visual designs sometimes rendered in realistic devices that include branding, colors, images, and typography.

Question 27

What are Design Systems?

Answer 27

A design system is a library of reusable components and guidelines that people within a company can combine into interfaces and interactions. What goes into a design system and how it is implemented can vary quite a bit from company to company, depending on the size and maturity of the design practice and the needs of the product team.

At their core, design systems provide consistent styling and interaction guidelines for teams. A robust design system makes the process of assembling interfaces much faster, as designers do not need to create elements from scratch.