Advanced techniques for designing web app interfaces

Alvin WoonDesign Lead, Plurk

We are designing a web application, not a promotion/marketing website.

Goal is to help user gets thing done

Steps before actual design

Personas

a summary representation of the UI's intended users, often described as real people.

- To understand personas and its importance, we have to understand the meaning of end goals.

- End goal is the most significant factors in determining the overall product experience.

what are end goals?

• Clear my desk before I leave for home.• Make good business decisions based on my data.• Find problems proactively before they become crit

ical.

UX practitioners must translate end goals into a product’s behaviors, tasks, look, and feel. Persona helps humanize the process in doing so. http://www.uxmatters.com

3 most important thing in personas creation: profile, scenario and avatar

but...

- inaccurate/biased pesonas lead to fictional UI trying to help fictional users reach their fictional end goals

- interview real people, don't assume you know what a teenage girl/60 grandpa wants.

- using personas when designing for 'everyone' risk alienating certain type of users (think social site)

Card sorting

...a method for discovering the latent structure in an unsorted list of statements or ideas. The investigator writes each statement on a small index card and requests six or more informants to sort these cards into groups or clusters, working on their own. - usabilityNET

in other words... card sorting is useful in grouping different, scattered content into similar sections. 

Wireframing

• establish consensus of ideas between various stakeholders

• designer and developer know where 'things at' 

• easier to change wireframe on the fly then actual pixel-perfect mockup

• more important in this ajax era - more quick screens to show the state of things. 

seth - subimage llc

 

Wireframe software

• axure, gliffy (professional, expensive, popular among UX in big corporations.

• DENIM (by University of Washington, open source, free)

• Alvin's favorite - pencil and paper :-) 

Task modeling and user flows

- if you design ten states/pages for a UI component, how does an engineer know the conditions under which each of the ten states appears?

- task flows = diagram (flowcharts or inter-linked components) that shows the relationship between components of various user interactions for an application. 

Paper prototyping

- prototyping interface using paper-based product (DUH!) - encourage fast iterations: you can switch and sketch and erase with apparent ease

- photoshop has layers. In PP, you can have many papers/cards illustrating different interaction process.

- allow users participation by drawing on mocks.

if you are bad at drawing...

there are some ready-to-print design stencils available for you to mix and match.

- Yahoo! Design Stencil

- http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/design/paperprototypinggraphics.asp

but...

- be careful when prototyping AJAXy interface with paper. Hard to communicate the concept of 'loading time' in paper.

- experimental navigation structure such as timeline, complex dropdown and etc are hard to illustrate via drawing.

- localization, RTL interface

Responsive UI

• speed is the biggest user experience improvement we can provide to users

• all of the things I'm going to present today will be useless if your web application is slow

• immediate feedback• cheat if you have to

Clear navigation

• use existing design pattern• avoid dropdown whenever

possible• breadcrumb is overrated (undo, proper

support of back button is more important)

• use card sorting to organize your content. Make sure you user can create a quick mental flow of the pages they have visited

Make it easy for users to recover from mistakes

• autosave• undo• informative error messages • unobstrusive reminder/warning

Choose a good default for user

• many choices = more time to make decisions. Clutter, too many options. Hick's Law.

 • your app might fail because of lack of

features, but never because of lack of UI and execution choices.

 • more options, more screens to test,

more alternate bugs.

Adaptive UI

• providing different UI to different type of users.

 • help user advances from novice,

intermediate to advance level. • personalization works if accuracy

of prediction is improved

Reuse existing design elements

• review current design components. reuse when possible

 • try to stick with existing color scheme,

typography, spacing • consistency in design = design elements

wont fight for user attention at the same time.

Effective color combination

• emphasize on contrast, whitespace, good typography and consistent alignment

 • learn about the fundamentals of color theory.

 • if you don't know what color to use - use light

blue/grey. Color blind-friendly, universal and culturally peaceful.

 • Choose color that reflects the sentiment of your

target audience. Conservative vs Explosive.

Color Theory

analogous colors scheme

complementary colors scheme

conservative color scheme

explosive color scheme

color blindness

Post launch: Study your users

• biggest social sites dedicate hundreds of servers for analytic purposes to study users cognitive style when using their site.

 • forget pageviews, visits. learn to dig

deep: entrance page, time on page, heatmap, eye tracking, AB testing

Keep iterating...

• AB testing • Use your analytic data and set a

goal • everything can be improved, let

the data speaks to you. Don't look for data to support your design reasoning. Be honest.

the end =)

questions?