I want to improve user experience of my app and web service, so that I looked up basic and foundation of UX concepts and materials, then jotted down some detail on this page.
User Experience Basics
Factors that Influence UX, Peter Morville's User Experience Honeycomb represents:
- Useful: Your content should be original and fulfill a need
- Usable: Site must be easy to use
- Desirable: Image, identity, brand and other design elements are used to evoke emotion and appreciation
- Findable: Content needs to be navigable and locatable onsite and offsite
- Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities
- Credible: User must trust and believe what you tell them
There are several areas related to bulding the UX. Some areas I interested in:
- Usability Evaluation
- Information Architecture (IA)
- User Interface Design
- Interaction Design (IxD)
- Accessibility
Usability Evaluation
Usability
Focuses on how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals.
- Intuitive design: a nearly effortless understanding
- Ease of learning: how fast new user accomplish basic tasks using UI
- Efficiency of use: how fast experienced user can do using UI
- Memorability: easy to remember so that they can reuse in the future
- Error frequency and severity: how often users make erros while using the systme, how serious the erros are, and how users recover from the erros
- Subjective satisfaction: if the user likes using the system
Evaluation Methods
Test early and often
- Baseline usability testing
- Focus groups, surveys and interviews
- Card Sort testing: help design or evaluate the information architecture.
- Pick and sort the cards from the deck based on importance or frequency
- Wireframe testing: no color, images, generic fonts. Low-fidelity / High-fidelity
- First click testing
- Gauge the user interaction end-to-end
- Percent Correct (Effectiveness)
- Time to Complete Each Scenario (Efficiency)
- Satisfaction
- Satisfaction surveys
- Before a product redesign
- After launching a new or revised product
- When you want to have content or features rated or ranked
Working with data from testing
- Quantitative data describes what actually happened.
- Qualitative data describes what participants thought or said.
Once you have gathered your data, use it to:
- Evaluate the usability of your product
- Recommend imporvements
- Implement hte recommendations
- Re-test the product to measure the effectiveness of your changes
User-centered design
Check the process map in the link.
User Interface Design
Choosing interface elements for your product.
Best Practices:
- Keep the interface simple
- Create consistency and use common UI elements
- Be purposeful in page layout
- Strategically use color and texture
- Use typography to create hierarchy and clarity
- Make sure that the system commuincates what's happening
- Think about the defaults
The Elements of User Experience
| Element | Description | Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Design | look-and-feel | Concrete / Completion |
| Interface Design | HCI, design of interface elemens to facilitate user interaction with functionality | |
| Information Design / Interaction Design | - In the Tuftean sense: designing the presentation of information to facilitate understanding - Development of application flows to facilitate user tasks, defining how the user interacts with site functionality | |
| Functional Specifications | "feature set", detailed descriptions of functionality the site must include in order to meet user needs. | |
| User Needs / Site Objectives | - Externally derived goals for the site; identified through user research, ethno/techno/psychographics, etc. - Business, creative, or other internally derived goals for the site. | Abstract / Conception |
The model outlined key considerations and it doesn't account actual process of the project.
User Experience Design by Peter Morville
Explained UX under information architecture's view. The honeycomb provides a balanced and modular approach.
Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
- Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site (by providing third-party support e.g. citations)
- Show that there's a real organization behind your site
- Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide
- Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site (1. using org., 2. using images or text, e.g. author's profile with family or hobbies)
- Make it easy to contact you
- Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose)
- Make your site easy to use -- useful
- Update your site's content often (at last show it's been reviewed recently)
- Use restraint with any promotional content (avoid if possible, or clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own.)
- Avoid erros of all types, no matter how small they seem.
References
- The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (2nd Edition) by Jesse James Garrett
- Standford Web Credibility Research
- Information Architecture Basics