The Complete Guide to User Experience — Part 2

In the previous blog, I talked about what a good user experience looks like and feels like, but it can be challenging to design a product that delivers that good user experience to the people that use it.

Fortunately, we know a few things that we can do to make it a lot easier for designers to ensure the product that comes out the end delivers a good user experience. First, we follow an iterative prototyping process where we design multiple versions of the product, each time getting better and better.

We apply a user-centered research and design approach to make sure that we’re keeping users’ needs and users’ capabilities in focus throughout the process.

We need to understand a bit about human behavior to make sure that we’re designing things that are likely to work and avoiding things that are likely to fail.

And we make sure that we use a process that allows us to apply our common sense to ensure that the product is moving in the right direction. The reason that we iterate is because we know that we’re not gonna get it right the first time.

We wanna fail as fast as we can, get it wrong as quickly and as often as possible, so that we can learn from our mistakes and get it less wrong each time. So that as we’re moving through their process, we’re designing a product that’s getting better and better and doing a better job of delivering a good user experience. The iterative design process that we apply in user experience can be thought of in this way.

We think of it as three phases involving assessment, design, and building.

So in the assessment phase, initially, what we’re doing is we’re assessing what users are currently doing and what their needs are so that we can understand the design space and the problems that they’re facing so that we can design products that will address those needs.

In the design phase, we take what we’ve learned in the initial assessment and come up with ideas, lots of ideas, for how we might deliver a product that solves the problem that we’ve identified in the assessment.

In the build phase, we take those design ideas or a subset of those design ideas, and we build them into prototypes or some kind of representation that we can use to communicate a particular idea. So that we can then use it to get feedback on whether that idea is headed in the right direction or in the wrong direction.

And we can then apply assessment methods, like user testing or formal inspection methods, to see if that prototype is leading towards a good user experience or a bad user experience.

And then we take what we learn from that, and we repeat it all again.

We go back to the drawing board.We design new ideas.We build new prototypes.We perform new assessments.And we continue this until we’re satisfied that the product is ready to go.

Another way to visualize this process that helps to show how the process could be iterative but still progress towards an ultimate endpoint is to view it as a spiral.

Where we start on the outside with the assessment phase, and we traverse around the spiral through the design, build, and assessment phase multiple times until we ultimately reach the center, which is the endpoint, the final design.

The other thing that’s nice about this visualization, is it kinda gives you a sense of you’re zeroing in on a target. And you’re getting closer and closer as you progress, and the design is getting more and more finalized and hopefully better as time goes on.

So we can see from this that an iterative design process includes both user experience research as well as user experience design.

And it’s critical that both research and design are used in a balanced way to iterate towards a successful solution.

So for UX research, there’s a set of methods, well-known methods that can be applied to understand user needs and evaluate prototypes as they’re being developed.

So for example, we often conduct interviews to understand more about users’ needs and how they currently do things.

We conduct observations to actually watch what people do and how they do it to understand things that they might not be able to tell us very effectively through interviews. Sometimes we conduct surveys, especially when we’re wanting to reach a very large audience, and we need to understand characteristics and behaviors and attitudes of that large audience. And we’re not able to reach out to every member of that audience, because there’s just too many of them. We use user testing to take a prototype or a system that we’ve developed and figured out whether or not people are able to accomplish what they need with that prototype or system.

We also apply a range of inspection methods where we can use best practices and knowledge about what works and what doesn’t to take a close look at a prototype or representation of a system to determine whether it’s on track for delivering a good user experience or not.

We also apply a set of design methods throughout the UX process.So for example, developing personas and scenarios and user stories to represent the types of people that need to use the system and the types of things that they need to be able to accomplish with the system.

We also use sketching and ideation to generate lots of different possible solutions so that we know that we have a lot that we can choose from so that we can get the best ideas out there.

We use storyboarding to think through what the interaction with a system might be.

So we can see whether it makes sense and whether that’s gonna be something that results in a good user experience. We use mapping and navigation design to map out all the different things that you can do with the system and make sure that they all make sense together. We conduct a comparative research where we go out and look at the competition or other examples of products that are trying to accomplish similar things to try to understand what are the best practices out there and what are the things that we might wanna avoid.

And we build multiple different types of prototypes from low to middle to high fidelity prototypes throughout the process to put those design ideas into a form that we can use for getting effective feedback and using for assessments like user testing. And as I said, it’s important to understand a little bit about how people work so that when we’re going through that design and prototyping process, we’re creating stuff that’s more likely to be effective in the end. So understanding things like, well, what can people perceive?

How does the human visual system work, for example?So how do people extract information from visual stimuli?How can you design a screen or a web page so that people can actually understand what’s on it? How do people do things? How do people act in the world? How do they decide how to act in the world? And how do they process information about the results of their action?

How do they know if they’re going in the right direction or if they need to take a different path?

So that we can design systems that guide people in the direction that they need to go.

And how does emotion play a role, or how, when, and why does emotion affect decision making, and what role does emotion play in user experience? So we can design systems that produce satisfying positive emotions in our users. And finally, we wanna set ourselves up so that we can use our common sense to design systems that will work. In a process that puts you in touch with user needs and practices and user responses to possible designs through user testing and other methods will allow you to see what works and what doesn’t.

So that’s how we make user experience easy, we make it easy on ourselves as designers of systems to produce products that deliver a great user experience. We followed an iterative prototyping process. We apply user-centered research and design methods throughout the process.We understand a bit about human behavior so that we can take the process in a positive direction. And we set ourselves up to be able to apply common sense, so that we are constantly moving towards a product that will, in the end, deliver a great user experience.

So how do we keep Good user experience in mind when we’re designing?

How do we focus our design so that we make sure we’re avoiding those qualities that we don’t want and moving towards the qualities that we do want.

Well, Frank Guo, writing for UXmatters in 2012, offered this simplified way of looking at user experience that I think is really useful.

He suggested we could break down user experience into four major components, its value Usability, Adaptability, and Desirability.So when we talk about value, we’re asking is this system or is this design useful for people? Does it accomplish what they need it to accomplish?And is it better than the alternatives?

So as an example, we can think of VisiCalc, which was developed in the late 70s and was the first software spreadsheet that was used by lots and lots of people.

And it was an enormous success because it allowed people to do something they simply couldn’t do before which was to be able to update a whole network of different formulas and see the results immediately.

So it allowed people to rapidly explore different financial calculations and so forth in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. So it delivered enormous value for people that needed to do these kinds of calculations, and it was vastly superior to anything else that was out there.

By modern standards, it wasn’t necessarily a huge usability success. In fact, when competitors came along a few years later, like Lotus 1–2–3 and Microsoft Excel, they eventually wiped out the market for Viscalc because they were able to offer superior usability and other qualities that were superior.

However, because VisiCalc initially offered functionality that didn’t exist, it was able to be incredibly successful. When we talk about usability, we’re asking can users do what they need to do?

So assuming we have the value right, are people able to actually realize that value.

And finally, Adaptability refers to how easy it is to find and start using a system or a device.

And to illustrate this I’ll show an example of a service that offers a very nice initial user experience. So, this is the website for Duolingo, which is a service for learning a new language.

And this is their screen that you see the first time you come to Duolingo and you haven’t ever used it before. So, very clear instructions, we get started and the first thing it asks is what language do I wanna use? Well, let’s say I wanna learn French It then asks me how serious I am about it.

So I don’t really know. I’ll just say I’m regular. So next it asks me am I new to French or if I already know some French. Let’s say I’m new to French. And I’m immediately starting to learn French.

It asks me to select the translation of the woman, and I start to engage in the learning process.

So you’ll notice it didn’t ask me to create a username or password or enter my credit card or any of those other things. It just got me right into the system and allowed me to start using it.

As I go forward, at some point it does ask me if I wanna create a profile so I can save my progress so things like that. But it succeeds on the adaptability criteria by making it very easy for me to get in and get started without having to go through a lot of other stuff that’s actually not interesting to me.

The basic methods that we use in user experience research and design are aimed at helping us address all of these Attributes of user experience. So the methods that we use for understanding users for designing and prototyping systems and evaluating designs can be applied to questions about the value usability, adaptability, and desirability of a system.

So for example, if we think about user experience research, I think about two main types of user experience research activities that we typically perform.

Activities around understanding users and activities around evaluating designs.

So when we’re asking questions about the value to users, in the understanding phase, we ask what is it that users need? What does our system need to provide for them? And when we’re evaluating, we ask does this design fulfill the needs that we understand? When asking about usability in the understanding phase, we need to understand how do they do it now, how do they accomplish the tasks that our system is going to support in their current lives and using their current systems?

Once we’re evaluating designs that we’ve produced, we ask, can they get it done? Can they do those tasks with this system that we’ve designed? When looking at desirability, in the understanding phase, we need to understand what do our users desire? What do they look for, what are their turn-ons and what are their turn-offs. And when we’re evaluating designs we can ask is this design appealing? Does it have those qualities of being fun and delightful and elegant that we associate with desirability?

And finally, when looking at adaptability, when we’re understanding users in the initial phases, we can ask where do users look for things? And how do they make sense of things when they first start to use them? And when we’re evaluating our designs, we can ask, can users find and access this system based on how we’re planning to provide it to them? The iterative design process that’s at the heart of user experience research and design is your guide for making sure that these different components of user experience are realized in the product that you’re designing.

To wrap up, the User Experience is multi-faceted, it’s not just about one of these things, it’s not just about usability or elegance or desirability.

Let’s follow an iterative process, by asking questions in the comment section below so that we together can come out with a product that delivers a great user experience.