User Experience Basics
User experience is “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service” (from Wikipedia, User Experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience). It’s the outcome of the interaction between a system, a service, a product and one or more individuals.
As a practice, User Experience helps design these services, systems or products in a way that they are useful, usable and engaging. As a starting point, the designers must answer the following questions:
- Who are the users of the document / interface / website / product?
- What are the users’ tasks and goals?
- What functions do the users need from the document?
- What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
- How do users think the it should work?
Great user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want. Designers, entrepreneurs and developers should try to understand what the real needs of a group of people are, not just what they say, when asked. How to do it? In a nutshell:
- Deeply understand what are the real needs of a group of people: observe them in the way they interact with all products and services they tend to use, understand their motivations for behaving in a certain way;
- Create a solid, useful, easy-to-understand proposition, based on existing or potential needs.
- Design how the visible components of the products will look, feel and behave; integrate these with the technical capabilities.
- Test what you have designed, and see if people understand its mechanisms.
- Also, try to understand if the product is really what makes a people’s lives better
This area helps entrepreneurs, designers and developers to learn more about the most recent User Experience methods, practices and cases, by collecting useful resources publicly available on specific topics.
Resources
- D4M - Resources for designing and building mobile applications and websites
- User Experience - Wikipedia
- User Experience - UX by Dirk Knemeyer and Eric Svoboda
- 10 Best UX Design Blogs
- Effective UX in a Corporate Environment: Part I
- 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
- Measuring User Experience
- The Elements of User Experience Visual Design
- Expanding the Approaches to User Experience
- Definition of User Experience Revisited
- UX Madness – 20 Fantastic Resources For User Experience Know How
- Vodafone’s ‘Create a great User Experience’ starter: this is a document (pdf format. If you need a software to open pdf files, you can find it here: www.adobe.com/products/reader). The document contains an introduction to what are the main principles and things to consider when designing a software for mobile. Although the examples shown are based on Vodafone 360 suite of services, the principles underneath are easily applicable to a variety of other products.
Events
- The MEX Conference: Enhancing mobile user experience in a multi-platform digital world
- Mobile Devices and the User Experience