Introducing User Experience Design to MIT Students

Designing the user experience Deborah A. Levinson

Discovery process – defining the problem • What are your goals? • Who will benefit from what you build? • What does your site/application need to do?

What are your goals? $$$ Corporate/ ? Sell products educational info Aggregate info Build community (portal, calendar)

MIT Housing website

MIT Division of Student Life website new! old

Who will benefit from what you build? primary audience secondary audience

Who will benefit from what you build? • Adults • Children • Teenagers • Students • Faculty Also consider … • Employees • Age • Customers • Gender • Investors • Education level • All of the above? • Profession or business sector • Computer/web literacy • Locale

What does your site/application need to do? Talk to your audience! Find out what they need. “Tell us about a time you used the site.” “If you don’t use the site, where do you find this information instead?” “What brings you here the most?” “Can you tell us about a time when …”

Audience needs/patterns of use drive the site design and features

What shouldn’t drive your design and feature set? cville.ownyourc.com Technology (yours or www.dpgraph.com someone else’s) www.defense.gov Fear and/or unwillingness to say “no”

Uncovering what users want and need surveys one-on-one focus groups interviews A B C competitive analysis anecdotal data observation

Communicating with your audience – content and its organization • Define key messages – elevator speech • Identify categories/subcategories of information • Inventory available content • Map content and categories into site structure

Information architecture examples csail.mit.edu www.apple.com old undergraduate housing page

Communicating with your audience – visual design Good visual design isn't just decoration – it's a core element of your organization's brand. • Describe your organization's key qualities and what makes you unique. • Understand your audience's perception of you and whether it matches your vision of yourself. If it doesn't, why not? Faculty/staff perception Student perception of MIT Medical of MIT Medical Excellent Adequate Convenient Inconvenient Accessible Far away Caring Slow friendly

Communicating with your audience – visual design Translate your most important qualities into design and features.

Tools & techniques – site maps

Tools & techniques – interviews with card-sorts and storytelling 5-12 participants < 30 cards ~ 4 questions

Interview results quotes stories Specific issues

students perceive the current site is failing to as soon as the “barrier” is MIT Medical as slow provide contact information for broken, students are to respond making an appointment, which is happy with the services the number one reason people visit the site Perception gap: students Content and UI: contact Different audiences have perceive MIT Medical as information must be readily different perceptions: slow, but it is fast and apparent – especially how to Medical needs to work to effective make an appointment overcome student perceptions, but faculty and staff are content

Tools & techniques – usability testing, with or without user interviews

Tools & techniques – scenarios of use

Tools & techniques – schematics/wireframes and clickable prototypes

Tools & techniques – flowcharts

Downloadable resources at http://web.mit.edu/debby/www/21w785/ Thank you! www.nimblepartners.com debby@nimblepartners.com Special thank-yous to Tania Schlatter for the hand-drawn illustrations, and to Leah Buley at Adaptive Path, who inspired parts of the presentation format.

Introducing User Experience Design to MIT Students

by Nimble Partners on Sep 16, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 53

Statistics

Introducing User Experience Design to MIT Students — Presentation Transcript