is a broad discipline covering areas such as research, visual design, information architecture, interaction design, content strategy and copywriting. It is generally broken into two major areas
is comprised of various testing methods, providing valuable insights into how products, services, and processes are experienced from a customer perspective. Research can be applied to COTS or custom solutions.
provides concepts, structure, interaction, and visual design support to create experiences (websites, applications, processes, etc.) that are as customer friendly as possible. In general, custom solutions require more user experience design than COTS solutions, but configurable systems often benefit from some UX design approaches.
: efficient, effective, error tolerant, engaging and easy to learn. Many projects focus on the first three, but the last two can be difficult to achieve. These are examples of where UX approaches can add a new dimension to a project. User Experience Design focuses on designing from the user’s point of view to create usable solutions. User Experience Research relies on user-feedback through evaluation rather than just trusting the expertise of the designer. Unlike software testing, usability evaluation involves watching real people use systems or prototypes and incorporates what is learned into the solution.
Like Architecture and Business Analysis, UX provides the most business value when started early in the project to help understand what users really need and focus on delivering the most valuable solution.
Research can help you better understand the user/customer experience of your product or processes. UX Research methods include (but are not limited to) the following:
: Used to systematically inspect a solution’s user-interface in a quick and inexpensive way to determine its level of usability. It can provide a general understanding of the design quality and help identify any potential design issues. Inspection typically performed by a small team of usability experts such as UX strategists.
Surveys: Used to gather feedback that can be quantified (as opposed to open-ended qualitative data) on systems and ideas. They are particularly useful when they include demographic, technographic, or psychographic questions that can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the system among various sets of users.
Contextual Inquiry: Consists of visiting several users on site, observing them carrying out their tasks, and analyzing and documenting the resultant data. It is used to examine and understand users and their workplace, tasks, issues and preferences. A CI can be used to produce user needs analyses, task analyses, and personas. Although CI is time-consuming, it uncovers a wealth of invaluable data.
User Interviews: Used to gain insight into stakeholder backgrounds (demographic, technographic, psychographic), mental models, attitudes, needs, challenges, and goals. Typically conducted in the Discovery phase in order to define personas and user groups, which provide context during the Define and Design phases of a project.
Card Sorting: Used to explore how people group items, in order to design organizational cues that maximize the likelihood that users will be able to find the items. Card Sorting also helps to identify terminology that is likely to be misunderstood. Card Sorting is appropriate when you have identified items that you need to categorize. Card Sorting is particularly useful for defining web site structures.
Usability Testing: Used to ensure that the users of a system can carry out the intended tasks efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily. Users are presented with a set of representative tasks and asked to undertake each one as they would in a typical work setting. Performance data including success rates, errors made, time on task, satisfaction rates, etc. are recorded and subsequently tabulated.
focuses on information architecture, interaction, and visual design. Typically performed by user experience strategists, architects, or designers that work with the project team to understand business and user requirements as well as technical limitations in order to produce concepts, wireframes, full-color composites, and specification documents that support the development effort. The following graphic shows a broad industry view of User Experience Design subject areas.
