The Process of UX Design

What does the process of user experience design look like?

Example Design Process

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Another Example Design Process

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These all look great on paper, but are often are they practical?

Practical UX

• Our design process
• Toolkit vs. process
• Usability and UX goals
• Goals vs. tasks
• Use of scenarios
• Agile and Lean UX
• Design as hypothesis

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our UX Design Process

Our Process as a Toolkit

Discover & Understand
Contextual inquiries *
Content inventory
Empathy maps *
Interviews
Job stories *
Jobs to be Done
Journey maps
Personas 
The five W's *
Usability/UX goals
User interviews
User profiles
User stories

Conceptualize & Define

Affinity diagrams
Conceptual models *
Design challenge statement
Design patterns
Flow diagrams
Product Reaction Cards
Seven stages of action
Design patterns
Sketching *

Visualize & Prototype
Content Prototyping
Interaction design principles *
Mobile design principles
Multi-device design principles
Responsive Web Design
Storyboards *
Visual design principles *
Wireframes 

Evaluate & Refine
5-Second test *
Cognitive walkthrough
Heuristic review
Usability testing * (informal and formal) 

Usability Goals - How it Works

• Learnability (first time users) 
  • The product should be easy to learn
• Efficiency (experienced users)
  • The product should be efficient to use
• Memorability (casual users)
  • The product should be easy to remember
• Error-resistance (all users)
  • The product should minimize usage errors

Defining Usability Goals

• Common factors for consideration are
  • Frequency of use
  • Importance of task or need
  • Task structure (e.g. complexity, repetition)
  • Motivation/attitude
• Assign a priority to each goal (e.g. 1-3)
  • Could be specifically measured, but overall usability assessment (e.g. SUS) is usually sufficient

UX Goals - How it Feels

• Product Reaction Cards by Microsoft (2002)
• 118 words (60% positive, 40% negative)
• Sample words
  • Appealing
  • Complex
  • Familiar
  • Hard to use
  • Organized
  • Relevant
  • Too technical
  • Valuable

Defining and Measuring UX Goals

• Defining
  • Select a set number of attributes (i.e. 4 to 8)
  • For each attribute, assign a priority and note reason
  • Consider visualizing results (e.g. word cloud)
    Measuring 
• Reduce attributes to ≈ 60 to 80
  • Ask participants to select most relevant 10
  • Visualize the results (e.g. word cloud)

Time for Questions & Discussion

• What we’ve covered so far 
  • Example design processes
  • Our design process
  • Process as toolkit
  • Usability goals
  • UX goals
• Coming up
  • What are scenarios?

What are Scenarios?

• Descriptions of people and their activities
• Series of events that results in reaching a goal
• Can be described textually or visually

Example Scenario

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Why Use Scenarios?

• Focus on (high-level) user goals
• Excellent way to share a vision (without requiring visuals)
• Highlights missing specifics early
• Provides a workflow-based viewpoint
• Establishes a shared understanding

Choosing Scenarios to Create

1. Create an inventory of user tasks (moderate granularity) for the system/product you will be creating
2. Determine frequency and importance for all tasks to help with scenario creation, prioritization and UI structure decisions

How to Create Good Scenarios

• Describe what, not how
• Be very specific
• Describe reaching a user goal (or solving a problem)
• Include underlying motivation
• Describe who the user(s) are
• Include the context of use

Describe What, Not How

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Be Very Specific

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Describes Reaching a Goal

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

What is the difference between a user goal and a task?

User Goal vs. Task

• Things users want or need to achieve 
• Tend to remain constant over time 
• System independent 
• Reaching a goal changes the state of the world 

Goals

User Goal vs. Task

• Must be performed to reach goals 
• Tend to change over time, often due to technology 
• System dependent 
• May require problem solving 

Tasks

Include Underlying Motivation

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Describe Who the User(s) Are

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Include the Context of Use

“Emma, a sales manager, needs to arrange a meeting with her 5-member sales team to work out the details of an upcoming promotion. Using the meeting room booking system from her office computer she determines when they can all meet this week and reserves a room with a projector for the meeting.”

Tips About Creating Scenarios

Start with a brief goal-oriented scenario including trigger (motivation) or alternatively create a process flow diagram

Tips About Creating Scenarios

Evaluate with real users whenever possible, to check for omissions, corrections, etc.

Identify Potential Features

Once scenarios have been created, review them to start identifying potential features of the system

Good Scenarios...

• Describe what, not how
• Be very specific
• Describe reaching a user goal (or solving a problem)
• Include underlying motivation
• Describe who the user(s) are
• Include the context of use

What About User Stories?

Example User Stories

As a Central Canadian Bank customer,
I want to withdrawal funds from an ATM
so that I have the cash I need on hand.

As a Central Canadian Bank customer,
I want to transfer funds from one account to another
so that I have the funds to cover a large cheque.

User Stories for Requirements

• Includes reaching the user's goal
• User plays a central role
• No interface assumptions are stated
• Linked to usage importance and frequency
• Can be initially fairly broad in nature

Time for More Questions
and Discussion

• What we’ve covered so far 
  • Scenarios
  • Goals vs tasks
  • User stories               
• Coming up
  • Agile development

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Agile Manifesto

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Where Does Agile Come From?

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Jeff Patton’s 12 Agile UX Best Practices

• Drive: UX practitioners are part of the customer or product owner team
• Research, model, and design up front - but only just enough
• Chunk your design work
• Use parallel track development to work ahead, and follow behind
• Buy design time with complex engineering stories
• Cultivate a user validation group for use for continuous user validation
• Schedule continuous user research in a separate track from development
• Leverage user time for multiple activities
• Use RITE to iterate UI before development
• Prototype in low fidelity
• Treat prototype as specification
• Become a design facilitator

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With Lean UX each
Design (Decision) is
Viewed as a Hypothesis

A hypothesis can be defined as an educated guess
that then can be tested to be shown correct

Example Hypotheses
(includes outcome & assumption)

• We believe that our customers will find the "add to cart" button because it is highly visible
• We believe that our customers will be able to complete the checkout process because it is very simple

Not Just for Design Mockups

Hypotheses can be formed during any stage of design (esp. during "requirement gathering") and evaluated in such ways as user interviews, observations, etc.

When to Test a Hypothesis?

When you feel like it is too early to test your hypothesis, it is likely the perfect time to test your hypothesis!

Waterfall vs. Agile vs. Lean?

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Summary

• Example UX design processes
• Our UX design process
  • Toolkit vs. process
  • Usability and UX goals
  • Use of scenarios
  • User goals vs. tasks
  • User stories
  • Agile development
  • Lean UX
  • Design, and research, as hypotheses

References and Suggested Books

• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and David Cronin
• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman 
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
• UX Team of One by Leah Buley