Fundamentals of User Experience

What you will learn here

• Principles of User Experience
• What User Experience Professionals Do
• What are the new roles and jobs in User Experience
  
• What's the Process
• Obstacles to creating a great User Experience

First you need to know your target audiences.For whom you are designing for. Is the product used by multiple people or couple of people. What is the context of your design.

User Experience Focuses On

1. Target Audience and Context of use
   

2. Ease of use and Easy to learn. 

3. Satisfying and Engaging

4. Goals of Organization into Account 

5. Human Experience Should be on Priority
   

As you are designing you should ask yourself, is this easy to use and learn for your users. What you think easy to use might not be same for your users.

For this you should understand about the psychology of the design. Study about the behavior and emotions of your user.

It's not enough just to design product. You should know the purpose of design for whom you are designing for. Suppose, you designing an experience for ride. It should be easy for people to get picked up and should use the ride sharing service. 

There are challenges and pressures from other places, which can impact negatively on your product. But you should keep the human experience on priority. It should be realistic.

Activities of User Experience Professionals

If someone is doing UX, they are interacting with the technology. When we talk about UX work, we talk about the interface layer. Some of the definitions and terms. It does not involve programing. This is not the part of the UX Job. There is separation between design and development. UX professionals includes -

User Research - Know Audience, Know Context, Include Inetrviews and Observation, Interviewing the stakeholders, Talk to them

Know more about user research and methods

High level design phase - Prototyping, sketching, story boarding, voice interface

Detailed level design - Final Mock Ups

Testing - Test the mock-ups with actual users

Iterate - Iterate your designs as per the feedback

 

User Experience Roles

It is possible for one person to do all these activities or it can be broken into different roles. Common role is UX Researcher. Sometimes it implies the upfront work. It also includes the user testing of the designs or the cognitive walk through.

User Experience Skills and Knowledge

1. User Research - Upfront
2. Plan and conduct the Interviews
3. Develop the insights from the Interviews
4. Describe the Target Audience
   
5. Describe Task Scenarios and Analysis
6. Journey Map
7. Card Sorting
8. User Testing 
9. Accessibility
   

During Design

1. Understands the Human Factors
2. Best Practice Principles and Industry Standards
3. Prototyping , Sketching and Story Boarding
   

Behavioral Science - Realistic UX can be built and people would love it as this is based on human emotions.  Experimental and observational studies of human behavior are called behavioral science. It includes

1. Emotional Design
2. Human Psychology
   

User Experience Processes

Components of Effective UX Research

1. UX Research
2. Prototype/Iteration
3. Collaboration
   
4. Dedicated UX Role   
   

Common UX Process

1. Agile
2. Design Thinking
3. Lean UX 
4. UCD (User Centered Design)
   

Agile VS User Experience

Agile is not about designing a User Experience. It's a developing a software product. Obvious , we need a layout interface on top of it, but it's not a user experience. The idea behind the Agile is you break up the code into small pieces. You might be ask to fit your UX into the Agile process. 

UX is often the part of the design thinking process. UX process is fit well into Design Thinking. Lean is not as widespread as Design Thinking or Agile.

The main idea behind lean is you do hypothesis testing. People are comfortable with speaking to medical team through internet. 

User Centered Design  starts with user research and then we do design that is high level and do lots of user testing.

Obstacles to User Experience Design

There are some people in the team that do not understand what UX is. They often misunderstood UX with the Visual Design. The problem is that they may fight for the opinion regarding the context or some functionality.  

1. People don't support the UX work.
2. Not having enough time, budget or resources
3. Not have enough time to test the designs