Creating products that people love

Steve BallardDirector of User Experience

Introductions

Steve BallardDirector of User Experience

What makes a successful product?

Why not just make products people don’t love? It’s easier

ProductCapability

Desirability

Viability

• Makes users feel stupid

• Causes users to make big mistakes

• Requires too much effort

• Is not engaging or enjoyable

In a mature industry, design innovation is essential

Believe it or not, product features become less important

user

hap

pin

ess

number of features

happy user peak

“Nice, but Iwish I could do more...”

“I’m so glad theyadded this.”

“Guess I better look at the manual.”

“Where the heck did they put that?”

“Now I can’t even do the one simple thing I bought this for...”

“Cool!”

“ I Suck!”

“I Rule!”

Enter User Experience Design

I must stop now and address this...

DESIGN(is a big word)

“Design is to design a design to produce a design”– John Heskett

• Good design ensures usefulness, usability and emotional connection

•Design is about planning what to build before you build it

•Design allows permission to explore

•Design requires collaboration with the builders

We design things people use“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” - Victor Papanek

Discussion

What is design?

How does designhappen in your organization?

What is User Experience Design?

“The user experience development process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user’s experience with your site [product] happens without your conscious explicit intent. This means taking into account every possibility and every action the user is likely to take and understanding the user’s expectations at every step of the way through that process” – Jesse James Garrett The Elements of User Experience

What is User Experience Design?

VisualInterfaceDesign

InteractionDesign

IndustrialDesign

Meet the UXD Cast?(more on this later)

VisualDesigner

InteractionDesigner

UXDesigner

IndustrialDesigner

Meet the UXD Cast?(more on this later)

VisualDesigner

InteractionDesigner

UXDesigner

Designs productbehavior

(usefulness usability)

Designs products’visual appearance (clarity, emotion brand)

Both(rare)

Interaction Design

“Every moment of every day millions of people send e-mail, talk on mobile phones, instant message each other, record TV shows with TiVo, and listen to their iPods. All of these things are made possible by good engineering. But it’s interaction design that makes them usable, useful, and fun.” – Dan Saffer Designing for Interaction

IxD VD

What Interaction Designers Do?

User Centered Design

• User research

• Personas

• User Flows & Scenarios

• Brainstorm, Ideation Sketching

•Wireframes Prototypes

• Usability testing design validation

InteractionDesign

User Research• Contextual Inquiry (Ethnographic Interviews)

• Be an Anthropologist

• Let them teach you, have a beginners mind

• Go to them, let them do the talking, take notes and photos

• Looking for patterns in goals, behavior, environment, etc.

• Good Designers will be suspect of surveys and focus groups to gather information about peoples behaviors and desires

User Centered Design

“Any attempt to reduce human behavior to statistics is likely to overlook important nuances, which make an

enormous difference to the design of products”- Alan Cooper

Our Customer Visit Photos

PersonasUser Centered Design

• A precisely defined fictional user based on the patterns we observed (goals being the most important)

• Provides a precise unambiguous definition of the “user” (avoids the “elastic user” problem)

• Help avoid designing for one’s self ordesigning for needs that don’t really exist

•We can more effectively design for just one person than for a group

• A communication tool to build commitment around a design

PersonasUser Centered Design

“If you try to design an automobile that pleases every possible driver, you end up with a car with every possible feature, but that pleases nobody.”- Alan Cooper

Our Personas

User Flows & ScenariosUser Centered Design

• Clearer picture if activities are getting your persona closer to their actual goals or not

• Better understand users’ mental (how does the user actually think about they way something works)

• A prototype of words that describes what your persona’s day would be like using the product you imagine

• Helps stakeholders envision what the product may be like. (great for getting buy-in)

Our User Flows

Brainstorm, Ideation SketchingUser Centered Design

IDEO’s 7 Rules

• Be Visual

•Defer judgment

• Encourage Wild Ideas

• Build on the Ideas of Others

• Go for Quantity

•One Conversation at a Time

• Stay Focused on the Topic

Brainstorm, Ideation SketchingUser Centered Design

Wireframes PrototypesUser Centered Design

Wireframing is at the heart of Interaction Design, and it’s important that it is done independently of Visual Design

and UI Development

Our Clickable Wireframes

Usability Testing ValidationUser Centered Design

What Visual Designers Do?

•Design research (brand emotion)

• Visual Language Studies

• Final High-Res Screen Design

• Icon Information Design

• Visual Style Guide

Visual InterfaceDesign

Visual Language Studies

High-Res Screen Design

Meet the UXD Cast?(I told you we’d come back to this)

VisualDesigner

InteractionDesigner

UXDesigner

How to hire a real UX Designer

•Many designers with no UX or IxD experience are calling themselves UX or IxD Designers - don’t get fooled

• Great print designers often make very poor Visual Interface Designers

• Reach out to them where they the real ones congregate (IxDA, UPA, UIE, Adaptive Path, Conferences)

• If they are any good they will already be employed and be making good money.

What to look for• Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio - that contains good examples of

research, personas, flows and wireframes.

• Ask them to describe why they made the design decisions they did. Have them explain their wireframes.

• Give them a written design problem and have them sketch a solution - design test to uncover design thinking skills

• Ask references specifically about IxD skills.

•Did I mention portfolio.

Discussion

Working with Product Managers

How do you currently workwith designers?

Challenges, Suggestions?

If you want to learn more

If you want to learn more