UX Design
Handbook
By Yuan Wen
This is an online interactive book that you can find theories and tools about User Experience (UX) design.The target audience are people who want to learn UX design.
Introduction
User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. -- Interaction Design Foundation
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UX design & Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
HCI is more academic-based and focuses more on research. UX design is more industry-based and focuses more on practice. While HCI focuses more on understanding the interaction between human and computers through research, UX design focuses more on dictating the rules about how to design a great user experience.
UX design & User-centered Design
User-centered Design is a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. UX design is User-centered. So they can exist together.
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Human's ability
Perception and sensation
To represent the world, we must first detect physical energy (a stimulus) from the environment and convert it into neural signals. This is a process called sensation.
When we select, organize, and interpret our sensations, this process is called perception.
Top five sensors: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.
Bottom-up Processing: Analysis of the stimulus begins with the sense receptors and works up to the level of the brain and mind.
Top-Down Processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes as we construct perceptions, drawing on our experience and expectations.
Feature Detection: Nerve cells in the visual cortex respond to specific features, such as edges, angles, and movement.
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Memory
Short-term memory (STM) is the capacity for holding, but not manipulating, a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. The duration of STM seems to be between 15 and 30 seconds, and the capacity about 7 items.
Long-term memory (LTM) is the stage of the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model where informative knowledge is held indefinitely. Theoretically, the capacity of long-term memory could be unlimited, the main constraint on recall being accessibility rather than availability. Duration might be a few minutes or a lifetime.
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information.
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Design principles
Design principles are fundamental pieces of advice for you to make easy-to-use, pleasurable designs. There are some most popular and useful principles identified by different researchers.
Visibility: The more visible functions are, the more likely users will be able to know what to do next. Incontrast, when functions are "out of sight," it makes them more difficult to find and know how to use.
Affordance: Affordance is a relationship between objects and the user. It's a perceived actionpossibilities. Thus, the affordance of an object depend on the user's physical capabilities and their goals and past experiences. For example, a mouse button invites pushing (in so doing acting clicking) by the way it is physically constrained in its plastic shell.
Signifiers: Don Norman states that "the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a person." A signifier can be anything used to indicate what affordances things have.
Constraints: It’s an aspect of the design that constrains, or restricts, a user from performing a certain action. It’s important to give limitations as a precautionary step to safeguard against users doing things you don't intend them to do.
Mapping: This refers to the relationship between controls and their effects in the world. Nearly all artifacts need some kind of mapping between controls and effects, whether it is a flashlight, car, power plant, or cockpit. An example of a good mapping between control and effect is the up and down arrows used to represent the up and down movement of the cursor, respectively, on a computer keyboard.
Consistency: This refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks. In particular, a consistent interface is one that follows rules, such as using the same operation to select all objects. For example, a consistent operation is using the same input action to highlight any graphical object at the interface, such as always clicking the left mouse button. Inconsistent interfaces, on the other hand, allow exceptions to a rule.
Simplicity: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Tolerance: The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.
Feedback: Feedback is about sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the person to continue with the activity. Various kinds of feedback are available for interaction design-audio, tactile, verbal, and combinations of these.
Equity: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities. It should provide the same means of use for all users: identical whenever possible; equivalent when not. It should avoid segregating or stigmatizing any users.
Flexibility: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. It provides choice in methods of use. It provides adaptability to the user’s pace.
Documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
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Mental Model
A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand. A mental model is based on belief, not facts. It's a prime goal for designers to make the user interface communicate the system's basic nature well enough that users form reasonably accurate (and thus useful) mental models.
A Conceptual model is an explanation or a conceptual understanding of how a product is designed to work. It’s the model that the designers want the end users to understand.
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Design life cycle
Needfinding
Needfinding focuses on learning information about your users: who they are, why they need to accomplish the task for which you are designing, and how they currently accomplish it.
Design alternatives
After we learn about our users via needfinding, we take that information and start to brainstorm potential solutions to satisfy the problems of these users.
The goal of this step is to generate lots of ideas. No idea is too crazy, as every idea help us to explore more of the potential design space for the target task.
Prototyping
After deciding on a few design alternatives that came out of brainstorming, we move on to prototyping some of those ideas out.
Prototypes can take many forms, on a range from lo-fi (paper prototypes, text prototypes) to hi-fi (interactive wireframes).
Evaluation
After building a prototype for a design alternative, we move on to the evaluation phase where we get that prototype in the hands of some real users to get feedback and validate our ideas.
Research techniques
Surveys: Surveys or questionnaires are useful to gather information on the profile of the user, his or her job responsibilities and opinion of the current version of product (if available) or similar product (if this is a new release). It is easy to collect both quantitative and qualitative information using surveys. Surveys may be online or face-to-face.
Interviews: Interviews are a "guided conversation where one person seeks information from the other." An interview may be conducted in conjunction with other requirements-gathering activity such as a site visit, or as a solo activity.
Focus group: A focus group is a qualitative research technique where a group of individuals are asked their opinions, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes or practices regarding a product, service or concept.
Observation: This technique focuses on seeing what the users actually do as opposed to what they say they do. Field research refers to research conducted outside a traditional lab setting, in a user's natural work environment.
Contextual inquiry: The contextual inquiry research technique combines observation with interview-style question and response. Participants get to explain their actions or "think aloud" as they work through a task or activity.
Think-aloud protocal: Think-aloud protocols involve participants thinking aloud as they are performing a set of specified tasks. Participants are asked to say whatever comes into their mind as they complete the task. This might include what they are looking at, thinking, doing, and feeling. This gives observers insight into the participant's cognitive processes (rather than only their final product), to make thought processes as explicit as possible during task performance.
Diary study: A diary study involves asking the test participants to record and report their experiences related to a particular subject over a period of time. Depending on the type of study, participants may use paper diaries, emails, twitter or a combination.
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Usability testing
Usability testing is a method of testing the functionality of a website, app, or other digital product by observing real users as they attempt to complete tasks on it. The goal is to reveal areas of confusion and uncover opportunities to improve the overall user experience.
Informative/ summative usability testing: Formative testing tells us what needs to be improved, whereas summative testing indicates whether or not these improvements were successful. Formative testing reveals insights that we can use to mock up our mid- and high-fidelity wireframes, whereas summative testing is often used to validate these wireframes once created.
Qualitative/ quantitative usability testing: Qualitative usability testing focuses on collecting insights, findings, and anecdotes about how people use the product or service. Quantitative usability testing focuses on collecting metrics that describe the user experience. Two of the metrics most commonly collected in quantitative usability testing are task success and time on task.
Heuristic evaluation: Heuristic evaluation (Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen 1994) is a usability engineering method for finding the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics").
Cognitive walkthrough: The cognitive walkthrough is a usability evaluation method in which one or more evaluators work through a series of tasks and ask a set of questions from the perspective of the user. The focus of the cognitive walkthrough is on understanding the system's learnability for new or infrequent users.
Guerrilla usability testing: What makes guerrilla usability testing unique is that participants are not recruited in advance. Instead, members of the public are approached by those conducting the study during live intercepts in cafés, libraries, and malls, or in any other natural environment. Arguably this makes guerrilla usability testing a quick, cheap and hassle-free way of gathering feedback from target users.
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