I posted a few days ago about user experience (UX) design and why it's important. I thought it may be useful to discuss a little more about the process behind UX design. It's a growing profession in the digital field since companies now need designs for applications that people will interact with as opposed to static print design.
When starting a new UX design, the first step is often getting to know who your audience is. This directly impacts how you will design your interface or website. Background research is typically needed during this part. Luckily, there are many tools out there for free that can help with this part. Google Analytics is a great resource to track data and analytics on websites. It also gives an estimate of the demographics of the audience on your site. However, you may want to do a little more research instead of taking the demographics at face value. While analyzing data and background of your target audience, it's a good time to create personas. A persona is a profile of a fictional character and the archetypical user of the system you are designing for, whether it be an app, a website, or a kiosk. The persona should be based off of ethnographic research you did. The point is to understand the main audience that will use your system and to understand their frustrations. This will help you determine design aspects such as what buttons should look like, where things are placed, and what language is used.
After coming up with your personas, sketching and wireframes are typically up next in the design process. Wireframes are beneficial because you don't have to do full scale, color mockups of your design. In this part of the process you are mainly concerned about how items are arranged and how the user will interact with the system. You don't need style, color, and font choices at this point. Usability testing can be done with wireframes by making prototypes of your design. There is a lot of great software out there to make wireframes. Some use programs like Axure, while others create them in Adobe Illustrator. Whatever your choice, after wire framing your design, you will want to test it with users. There are pros/cons to high-fi or low-fi prototypes and you'll need to choose which one works best for your process. An example of a low-fi prototype is paper prototyping. After your wireframes are completed, you can print them out and cut out all of the different screens. You'll want to get someone that fits the persona you created and test them on your prototype. If you are using paper, you will replace the "screen" with the pieces of paper that have been cut out. This is beneficial because you can somewhat simulate real-time interaction while just using something quick and cheap like paper. High-fi prototypes more closely resemble your end product, but may take longer to create or cost more money. Often times I like to use InVision. InVision (invisionapp.com) is a free interactive prototyping tool that is available online. You can create wireframes or color mock ups in Photoshop then upload the images of all the screens and options into your InVision project. At this point, you can create "hot spots" on the image that when clicked, link to other images. For apps or websites, this directly relates to the actual use of the system.
When doing usability testing, there are a lot of different ways to get information from your users. Typically you will want to give your users a scenario and a set of tasks that they need to complete on the system. You may create a survey in which they can take to get preliminary information such as demographics or usage patterns prior to performing the test. During the test you can have the user think out loud their thought process and make notes on how they think or what their frustrations are. There is also software available that will record both the computer screen as well as the user's face. This will let you see where they hover the mouse and where their eyes are searching on the screen. If any talking out loud is done, this will be recorded too.
After finding problems with your design, the next step will be to reiterate your design to fix your issues. It only takes 5 people to test your system to find 85% of your problems. Usability testing should be done early on in the process as well as later when you think final designs are done. This information is extremely valuable to help your design process.
I will go into more about the next steps in UX design in a later post. That's all for now!
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