Fundamentals of UX Design

1. Fundamentals of UX Design
DEEP DIVE

2. User Experience DesignExperience

3. User Experience DesignExperience

4. “‘User experience’ encompasses
all aspects of the end-user's
interaction with the company,
its services, and its products”
—Jakob Nielsen
Experience

5. ‘Experience’ is how someone
feels when they use a product
Experience

6. ASPECTS OF A PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
Emotional response
Trust
Expectations
Utility/Effectiveness
Stickiness
Experience

7. User Experience DesignDesign

8. “Design is not just what it
looks like and feels like.
Design is how it works.”
—Steve Jobs
Design

9. “The prioritized application of
empathy in the design of
consumer products”
So, then, UX design is...
So then UX Design is...

10. Empathy
So, then, UX design is...

11. ...even at the cost of
time, effort, and money
So, then, UX design is...
(...in the short term)

12. a science
What is UD design?
UX !=

13. What is UD design?
UX !=
a science
always quantifiable

14. Make good guesses

15. Ethnographic research
You can’t empathize with someone you don’t know
Market research
You can’t take advantage of an opportunity you don’t understand
Testing
You can’t know if it’s working if you don’t test
Make good guesses

16. Ethnographic research
Field interviews, observation, surveys, profiles/classes/personas
Market research
Surveys, demand analysis, competitive audits, cost/opportunity
Testing
Usability testing (lab or remote), focus groups, interviews, eye
tracking, A/B testing, benchmarking, customer feedback, card
sorting, data analysis for qualitative methods
Make good guesses

17. “I never design a building before I've
seen the site and met the people who
will be using it”
—Frank Lloyd Wright
Make good guesses

18. Do good work

19. Good design is innovative
makes a product useful
is aesthetic
makes a product understandable
is unobtrusive
is honest
is long-lasting
is thorough down to the last detail
is environmentally-friendly
is as little design as possible
Dieter Rams
Do good work

20. “You can argue that people will never see it and it's
very hard to, in any rational sense, describe why it's
important, but it just seems important.
It's a way that you demonstrate that you care for the
people that you are making these products for. It's
important. It's right.
...it's just very hard to explain why."
—Jony Ive
Do good work

21. Good design doesn’t get noticed,
but bad design sure does
Do good work

22. Norman doors

23. Do good work

24. Do good work

25. Patterns and cuesDo good work

26. Patterns and cuesDo good work

27. Patterns and cuesDo good work

28. Do good work
The Hamburger Button

29. Do good work

30. Your primary navigation
shouldn’t require a tutorial
Do good work

31. “Any time you see signs or
labels added to a device, it is
an indication of bad design”
—Don Norman
Do good work

32. “Technology changes rapidly.
People change slowly.”
Make good guesses

33. Isn’t this just common sense?
Do good work

34. UX Basic Training
Business value of UX design
Learn tips for promoting UX as a competitive advantage
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and usability metrics
Return on Investment (ROI)
Learn to sell UX as a competitive advantage
Foundation of user experience
Defining key terms and understanding the relationships among them, such as: user experience (UX), usability, utility, usefulness, user centered
design (UCD), human factors, human-computer interaction (HCI), user interface (UI), graphical user interface (GUI), natural user interface (NUI),
eyetracking gaze plot and heat maps, cross-channel design, responsive web design, emotional design, information architecture (IA), visual/graphic
design, interaction design (IxD), search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, accessibility, and more
Design products around people, instead of teaching people how to use products
What it means to do user experience design
Usability, usefulness, utility, and user experience
How we measure usability
Usability and user satisfaction
Understanding people in order to improve our design
Age and gender differences
Cognitive aspects of user behavior
Designing for the initial experience compared to supporting skilled performance
Growth in user expertise over time and learning curves Do good work

35. UX Basic Training
Growth in user expertise over time and learning curves
Supporting people with disabilities
Create personas to focus the team on specific audience segments
What you can do to improve the UX
Form multidisciplinary project teams
Know who you're designing for
Follow design standards
Test your design early and often
Know when to apply which research methods and how to use the data to improve design
Conducting studies in usability labs
Testing your design remotely with people in their own home or office
Eyetracking costs and benefits
Field studies, site visits, and ethnography to uncover how your product is used "in the wild"
Surveys and focus groups to gather preference data
Customer satisfaction scores
A/B and multivariate testing
What to measure with site analytics
Reading the value of site metrics
Content strategy
Determining navigation through card sorting or tree testing Do good work

36. UX Basic Training
Content strategy
Determining navigation through card sorting or tree testing
Qualitative vs. quantitative methods
Outsourcing or doing it yourself
Starting designs off right
Focus on all levels of user interface from content to visual design
Follow usability guidelines and best practices
Pattern libraries
Platform conventions
History, trends, and challenges for UX
Adaptive content and responsive web design
Evaluating UX research, articles, and blogs
User and system control
Integrating usability with the project lifecycle
Traditional development processes and UX
Agile methods and UX
Creating time for research and iterative design
Involve developers early
Durability of usability guidelines Do good work

37. UX Basic Training
Durability of usability guidelines
Iterative design and prototyping
Understand the purpose and roles of UX professionals throughout a project lifecycle
Who should conduct research: Designers or dedicated experts?
How to evaluate consultant quality
Building a UX team
Fitting UX within your organization
Being effective as the sole UX person in a company or group
Transitioning into a UX role
UX degrees and certifications
Stages of organizational UX maturity
Assess your organization’s commitment to UX
What to expect as your organization goes through the next step of UX maturity
Choosing high-impact projects to drive personal and organizational growth
Do good work

38. What designers actually do

39. 1. Build understanding
THE SPACE
Foundational research
Market research
Competitive research
THE AUDIENCE
User research & interviews
Surveys
Profiles, classes, personas
Jobs to be done
What designers
do

40. Purpose • Why bother?
Principles • Who are designers?
Usage • User stories, jobs-to-be-done, features
Users • Profiles, classes, personas
Considerations • Budget, timing, resources, dependencies
Success • Metrics, goals
2. Make some guesses
What designers
do

41. 3. Try some stuff
Sketches
WireframesWhat designers
do

42. 3. Try some stuff User flows
What designers
do

43. 3. Try some stuff
Patterns, frameworks,
and trusted approaches
What designers
do

44. TEST EARLY DESIGNS
Internal testing
Usability labs
Interviews
Diary studies
A/B tests
CHECK ALIGNMENT
Product/market fit
Principles
Priorities
User stories
Jobs-to-do
Focus groups
4. Evaluate
What designers
do

45. Reality check: What’s working and what’s not?
Where to focus, what to cut
More testing
5. Re-focus efforts
What designers
do

46. 6. Measure and iterate
Figure out where we didn’t get it quite
right and commit to making it better
Don’t release early unless you’re ready
to release often
What designers
do

47. Thanks

48. Further reading
UX Magazine
UX Magazine is a high-quality resource that publishes discussions on ways to enhance the user experience.
Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine is an online magazine for professional web designers and developers, with a focus on useful
techniques, best practices and valuable insights for professionals.
UX Booth
UX Booth is a multi-author blog catering to the user experience community. It also covers usability and interaction
design.
User Interface: Stack Exchange
Still in beta, UI Stack Exchange (part of the Stack Overflow network) is a collaboratively edited question-and-
answer website for user interface researchers and experts.
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow, a popular programming Q&A website, has awesome question threads tagged with UX and
Usability.
UX Exchange
UX Exchange is a community-driven website where members can ask about user experience and UX-related fields
such as usability, accessibility and interaction design.
User Interface Engineering
UIE is the largest usability research organization in the world. It publishes articles and research findings on its
website.
UXmatters
UXmatters is a Web magazine that publishes content on user experience strategies, information on the UX
discipline and more.
52 Weeksof UX
This website by Joshua Porter and JoshuBrewer covers topics related to “the process of designing for real people.”
Boxes and Arrows
Though Boxes and Arrows describes itself as being “devoted to the practice, innovation and discussion of design,”
the website regularly publishes top-notch articles about UX.

49. Further reading
Johnny HollandMagazine
This Web magazine is about interaction and UX design. Be sure to check out the UX Tips section, which indexes
tweets hashed with #uxtips.
UX Pond
UX Pond is a search engine dedicated to UX-related content.
AdaptivePath Blog
Adaptive Path, a leading user interface and user experience design firm, runs a blog with useful content on UX and
UI design.
Putting People First
This portal provides links, articles, resources and news about UX and “people-centered innovation,” curated by the
Italy-based experience design company Experientia.
nForm Blog
The blog of nForm (a consulting team focused on user experience) publishes great content relevant to UX
designers.
VigetAdvance
The UX-related blog of Viget Advance, a website production company.
useit.com
Highly-respected usability researcher and ground-breaking author, Jakob Nielsen, writes a column named
Alertbox on the topic of usability and UX.
UX Array
Sara Summers, user experience evangelist for Microsoft, blogs about (you guessed it) UX on her blog.
UI and Us
UI and Us is “about user interface design, user experience design and the cognitive psychology behind design.”
UX Storytellers
UX Storytellers uses one of the profession’s methodologies (storytelling) to tell the stories of UX, UI and IA
professionals.

50. Further reading
UsabilityPost
This blog by Dmitry Fadeyev is about design in the context of function.
101 ThingsI Learnedin Interaction DesignSchool
Interaction design is intimately related to UX, and this blog offers short and “easily digestible” posts on the topic.
UX Quotes
This website provides quote snippets on the topic of UX.
QuotesFrom the User
User experience is all about the user (which is why personas are important). This Tumblr blog tells the story of UX
from the perspective of the user by featuring quotes by users of various systems.
everydayUX
This blog by the head of product at FourSquare (a popular location-based social networking service), Alex Rainert,
often covers his thoughts on information and interaction design.
Konigi
Konigi indexes news, resources and tools for UX designers (in a nice gallery layout that makes browsing the
website easy).
90 percent of everything
This blog by user experience lead Harry Brignull covers information architecture, user experience and the nature
of “good design.”
DarkPatterns.org
This design pattern library discusses common tactics for decieving users, which can help UX designers locate
patterns to avoid if they want to create a positive user experience.
Semantics
Peter Morville, founder of Semantic Studios, a leading information architecture, user experience and findability
consultancy, writes about user experience (and related topics) in this Web column.