MoN Oct. 30

Goals

• I understand the term UX and it's meaning and can explain it to others
• I can explain what a persona is
• I have created a persona and a user journey together with my team (group work in the afternoon)

Definition of User Experience (UX)

• "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/
• User experience design is a human-first way of designing products.
• https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/the-difference-between-ux-and-ui-design-a-laymans-guide/
• User experience design (UX, UXD, UED or XD) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.[1] User experience design encompasses traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design, and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design
• Explaining UX Design → https://uxmag.com/articles/explaining-ux-design-to-your-team
• http://uxdesign.com/ux-defined

A great Collection of Slide Decks which explain what UX is (and what not)

http://blog.logodesignguru.com/12-ux-design-tutorials/

Definition of Usability

How to define usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview defines key usability concepts and answers basic questions.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/

1 · explore

Research / Observe

In the given area you first have to get a certain degree of knowledge. This can be achieved through different approaches. But the beside classic research or reading studies, in my opinion the best way possible is always to talk to real people.

Hypothesis

Before you even can start sketching out your idea, you might need to have a basis of assumptions you can build your idea upon. These assumptions (or hypothesis) you then need to validate in order to know, if your thoughts are going into the right direction.

Experiment / Validate

Survey: enables you to get data from a large sample of people.

• Open-Questions
• Likert-Scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale)
• Closed-Questions

Interview: enables you to get to more concrete data from a small sample of people.

• Structured
• Contextual

Field study: observation of genuine user behavior in the context of use.

Conclude

When you have conducted an interview or have run a survey, you have a lot more information and statements available. But you are not done with that, you have to break it down and come to a conclusion.

2 · ideate

Finally, you now have a solid basis for your further work. In the best case you have some validated hypothesis and conclusions which help you going on.

When generating hypothesis you might also already have asked yourself, WHO will be interacting with you product. This leads us the next topic…

Define the actors

An actor usually refers to an element that interacts with the modeled system. Mostly it is related to a specific use case (User Journey, User Story):

It is the actor who initiates a process or who receives the expected results of a use case.

Actors should not be confused with real-world characters or systems, but should rather be considered as a kind of role. As a rule, generic terms (such as "teacher" or “administrator”) usually are the better choice than personal identifiers.

Create personas

Definition:

On the basis of observations on real people, some fictitious persons are created, who should stand for the majority of actual users of the (future) product.

Everyone involved in a project should have a good understanding of the context of the product they are building. “Who exactly is using this thing (or this part of the product) in the end?” is actually what you should have in mind. Depending on these informations you are able to make decisions while developing the product.

Decisions, not only made by Project Managers/Product Owners or the UX guy, but also decisions to be made by a developer.

Based on your research, studies, surveys and talks you should be able to create personas.

User Journeys

A User Journey (or Customer Journey, or Customer Experience Map, or … you know …) basically tries to answer the question:

“What journey does a User/Customer take while interacting with your product?”

The goal of this maybe fancy looking step/method actually is to understand, what flow a user is going through and where maybe there are steps, where there are so called “pain points”. Pain points lead to potential to optimize a solution/service/product.

If you (can) take the phase of analysis serious, you define two types of user journeys per persona and per use case:

• past/present user journey (now)
• future user journey (goal)

While the concept of defining a User Journey is quiet common, there is no such thing like the one and only correct template to do that. Basically you can go from very simple/basic to very detailed … depending on what time you want (or can) invest and on what details you will need for the further work with this piece of work.

There are just a few steps which you need to respect:

• define the relevant use cases per actor
• define the relevant steps/phases in the flow of an actor
  • minimum:
    • before (leads to first touchpoint with product)
    • during (interaction with product)
    • after (conversion/finalising the action)
• define what information you want to document per segment, like…
  • needs/requirements (user needs)
  • action (interaction)
  • feelings/thoughts (the emotional arc)
  • pain points/barriers (opportunities)
  • channel/medium/level, if multiple

afternoon tasks

1. Specify actors (plenum)
2. form working groups (one per actors)
3. in the working group:
   1. create/define personas
   2. in the working group: specify key use cases for your actor (1-3 use cases)
   3. document the future user journey per use case/task