User Experience Design
Creating Effective, User-Centric Experience across Any Media
As technologies are often overly complex for their intended target audience, interaction design aims to minimize the learning curve and to increase accuracy and efficiency of a task without diminishing usefulness. The objective is to reduce frustration and increase user productivity and satisfaction.
Interaction design attempts to improve the usability and experience of the product, by first researching and understanding certain users' needs and then designing to meet and exceed them. (Figuring out who needs to use it, and how those people would like to use it.)
Only by involving users who will use a product or system on a regular basis will designers be able to properly tailor and maximize usability. Involving real users, designers gain the ability to better understand user goals and experiences. (see also: User-centered design) There are also positive side effects which include enhanced system capability awareness and user ownership. It is important that the user be aware of system capabilities from an early stage so that expectations regarding functionality are both realistic and properly understood. Also, users who have been active participants in a product's development are more likely to feel a sense of ownership, thus increasing overall satisfaction.
Methodologies
Interaction designers often follow similar processes to create a solution (not the solution) to a known interface design problem. Designers build rapid prototypes and test them with the users to validate or rebut the idea.
There are six major steps in interaction design. Based on user feedback, several iteration cycles of any set of steps may occur.
1. Design research Using design research techniques (observations, interviews, questionnaires, and related activities), designers investigate users and their environment in order to learn more about them and thus be better able to design for them.
2. Research analysis and concept generation Drawing on a combination of user research, technological possibilities, and business opportunities, designers create concepts for new software, products, services, or systems. This process may involve multiple rounds of brainstorming, discussion, and refinement.
To help designers realize user requirements, they may use tools such as personas or user profiles that are reflective of their targeted user group. From these personae, and the patterns of behavior observed in the research, designers create scenarios (or user stories) or storyboards, which imagine a future work flow the users will go through using the product or service.
After thorough analysis using various tools and models, designers create a high level summary spanning across all levels of user requirements. This includes a vision statement regarding the current and future goals of a project.
3. Alternative design and evaluation Once a clear view of the problem domain exists, designers develop alternative solutions with crude prototypes to help convey concepts and ideas. Proposed solutions are evaluated and, perhaps, merged. The end result should be a design that solves as many of the user requirements as possible.
Among the tools that may be used for this process are wireframing and flow diagrams. The features and functionality of a product or service are often outlined in a document known as a wireframe ("schematics" is an alternate term). Wireframes are a page-by-page or screen-by-screen detail of the system, which include notes ("annotations") describing how the system will operate. Flow Diagrams outline the logic and steps of the system or an individual feature.
The cognitive dimensions framework provides a specialized vocabulary to evaluate particular design solutions, and aid in the creation of new designs from existing ones through design manoeuvres.
4. Prototyping and usability testing Interaction designers use a variety of prototyping techniques to test aspects of design ideas. These can be roughly divided into three classes: those that test the role of an artifact, those that test its look and feel and those that test its implementation. Sometimes, these are called experience prototypes to emphasize their interactive nature. Prototypes can be physical or digital, high- or low-fidelity.
5. Implementation Interaction designers need to be involved during the development of the product or service to ensure that what was designed is implemented correctly. Often, changes need to be made during the building process, and interaction designers should be involved with any of the on-the-fly modifications to the design.
6. System testing Once the system is built, often another round of testing, for both usability and errors ("bug catching") is performed. Ideally, the designer will be involved here as well, to make any modifications to the system that are required.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
