1. UX 101 sneak peek #4 — user experience design and the power of clarity

    Our goal with “User Experience 101” is to help you start creating great user experiences.

    It’s through the art and craft of interaction design that we create technologies which work for our users, rather than frustrating and confusing them.  Great designers from many disciplines (such as industrial design, graphic design, participatory design, and human-computer interaction) have developed approaches and principles that help us design more effectively. Like many of these inspirational designers, we believe good design is fundamentally about clarity.  We can promote clarity in our design work in several ways… 

    • Shift perspective from “completing the spec” to “crafting an elegant design.” As Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen note: “The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features.”  Few product teams have fully adopted this holistic perspective on design. 
    • Optimize the key flows.  Your application or service exists to help your users accomplish something (even if that something is just “have fun,” as in a game).  Your job as a designer is to polish and refine the flow of information users access, and the actions they take, to accomplish their goals.  As Jason Putorti says, “Think in flows not screens.”
    • Use plain language that communicates quickly.  Journalists have long known this: people are busy and overwhelmed with information. They have little patience for jargon, sophisticated terminology, and dense, complicated language.  We must keep things simple.  Not simple in the sense of “dumbed down,” but simple in the sense of clear — reduced to the essentials.
    • Respect our natural, human limitations: memory, concentration, physical movement, etc..  The best designers are respectful.  They know that using technology can be difficult and tiring.  As they design, they take into account key facts about our minds and bodies that constrain the design.  For example, it can be difficult to remember commands or data that we refer to infrequently.  It can be frustrating and draining to read through long blocks of small text.  It is time-consuming to move a mouse pointer across most of a screen, over and over again, to reach a commonly-used button.  As we think about these negative user experiences, we can start to see how we could design better ones.
    • Design is a conversation.  Great design comes not just from the expertise of the designer, but from ongoing, evolving dialogue between designers and users.  One model for this conversation is RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation), which emphasizes the value of seeking quick, low-cost feedback from users throughout a development cycle.

    Want to create clarity, rather than confusion, with your designs?  Join us.

    Early-bird discounted pricing expires on August 16th!

    Register online today at http://ux101.eventbrite.com/ .  

    morebetterabe  /  1 year ago  /  Notes