Web Usability Flashcards
User-Centered Design
- Product development often leaves out UX
- Just it works and looks good doesnt mean it has a great UX!
- A philosophy of product development
- The product is not an end in itself
- The product is a method of providing a good user experience
- Suite of methods emphasizing understanding people rather than technology
User Experience
How a product behaves and is used in the real world, incorporating a range of factors.
Users need products that:
- work
- are usuable
- meet expectations
Different user expectation, whether wanting to read information (e.g. news), or manipulate information (web application).
Important because people rarely read web pages word by word; instead, scane, bounce, jump… for about 10 seconds per page.
UX should be useful, desirable, usable, accessible, credible, findable
5 Elements of User Experience
- Surface (most concrete)
- Skeleton
- Structure
- Scope
- Strategy (most abstract)
The Basic Duality
Web as an application / Web as information
The Strategy Plane
User Needs: what the site must do for the people who use it
Site Objectives: what the site must do for the people who build it
Researching Users (part of Strategy Plane)
User Segmentation breaks audience down into manageable segments based on shared characteristics
Create Personas, extrapolations from a general set of characteristics based on research
Monitoring success using web analytics to see if changes made a difference
Possible Segmentation (part of Strategy Plane)
– By level of familiarity with the site
– By use-requirement context
– By characteristics such as literacy level
– ‘Users’ can be human or computer
The Scope Plane
Functional Specifications: application features the site must include
Content Requirements: content elements the site must include (expectations, format, etc.)
- What do users need and want?
- What are their abilities and limitations?
The Structure Plane
the hierarchy of different pages
Interaction Design: how users move from one step in a process to the next (system inputs & outputs)
Information Architecture: how users move from one content element to the next (conceptual relationships between elements)
- Architecture can be top-down, bottom-up, diagrams, etc.
- Most important information at the top
The Skeleton Plane
Information Design: comprehension of information (attention management, communicating relationships and importance, …)
Interface Design: user input and system output
Navigation Design: movement through the site
Wireframe brings all skeleton issues together into one high-level sketch
The Surface Plane
Visual Design (color, fonts, …)
Usability Evaluation Methods
With user input:
- clickstream analysis - users journey through pages
- think aloud protocol
- realistic tasks
- open neutral questions
Planning a usability test
- Set testing goals (what, why, with whom)
- Prepare participant profile (e.g. demographics, geographic, user groups)
- Recruit users
- Create scenarios and tasks to be tested
- Test environment, equipment and logistics
- Time for analysis
- Report
