The meat in the sandwich not the icing on the cake - a brief introduction to user experience. What is it? What are the tools and

1. Sep 10th 2020 @ 7PM
Zoom
Talk
Ian Westbrook

2. A brief overview of the history and practice
of user experience
Defining the user experience since 2004
Ian Westbrook, Director and Lead UX Consultant, Future Dream Media

3. Defining the user experience since 2004
About your speaker…

4. User Experience – a brief overview
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs
What is experience design?
Simplicable.com
Experience design is the practice of designing products, services, media, information and
interactions for humans. It is an extremely broad field that takes into account ideas,
emotions, culture, language, aesthetics and anything else that influences human experience.
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users
and their needs in each entered phase of the design process.
The Interactive Design Foundation

5. User Experience – a brief overview
To put it another way…
User experience is an attempt to analyse and understand a user’s end-to-end engagement with a
product or service across all touch-points, from initial contact to the end of the engagement lifecycle.
User Centered Design is an attempt to take that understanding and use it to create a design which
enables and optimizes that engagement.

6. User Experience – a brief overview
Mapping the user experience

7. “On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If
the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people
leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t
answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here?”
Jakob Nielsen
User Experience – a brief overview
So why does it matter?

8. “You can fail in design or you can fail in the marketplace.
Your choice.”
anon
User Experience – a brief overview
Or, to put it another way:

9. User Experience – a brief overview
In essence, the experience design process is about removing opinion and replacing it with fact
• ‘Talk’ to real customers and users of a web site or service
• Model their characteristics and behaviours (through persona creation)
• Think about how those personas might interact with a web site (using a sitemap or prototype)
• Validate that hypothesis through usability testing with real users
• Iterate based on the results
With this process it is possible to make design decisions based not on opinion but based instead on data and
observation.

10. User Experience – a brief overview
Successful digital experiences almost always have things in common:
1. Utility (usefulness)
2. Usability (ease of use, encourages exploration)
3. Appealing (aesthetically attractive and uncluttered)
4. Engaging (enjoyment of use, encouraging an appetite for repeat use)
UX and UCD isn’t an exact science. However…

11. User Experience – a brief overview

12. User Experience – a brief overview
The web site (or piece of
software) - what people see
and interact with
The thinking that went into it:
• Research
• Analysis
• Design
• Testing
Or, to put it another way… The ‘iceberg’ model
The web site that people see is only a small distillation of all the thinking and research/design activities that went
into its creation…

13. Keeping key questions in mind at all times –
• Who are the users?
• What are they trying to achieve at this stage of their journey?
• What do they need to support that task?
UX isn’t an exact science, but thinking about these concepts is an investment, not a cost.
User Experience – a brief overview
“Ease of use doesn't come from wishful thinking. It comes from conducting systematic usability engineering
activities throughout the project lifecycle. This is real work and costs real money, though not as much as some
people fear.”
Nielsen Norman Group - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/return-on-investment-for-usability/

14. User Experience – a brief overview

15. User Experience – a brief overview
• They might think they know what they want.
• A client’s view – unless based on hard data – is just an opinion.
• It may be based on old ideas, or just plain wrong.
• It needs to be validated – or challenged – just like any other opinion.
Important point: clients don’t always know what they need!

16. User Experience – a brief overview
UX activities have the greatest impact near the beginning of a project*
* But continue to have an impact throughout the project lifecycle…

17. A User Centered Design Process – high-level view
User Experience – a brief overview

18. Regardless of the activities undertaken, always remember two things:
Context is king
The user’s context • who they are, relevant personal characteristics (eg age, ability etc)
• the tasks and objectives they need to perform
• their environment (eg noise, lighting - if relevant)
• the form factor of the device they are using
• …other context relevant to the project
Validate early, validate often
Throughout the design process validate your assumptions. Get work-in-progress in front of real users as
often as is feasible to confirm – or contradict – design decisions, and react accordingly. It is quicker,
easier and (much) cheaper to make changes during UX design than during production/build.
User Experience – a brief overview

19. Thank you!
We hope you have enjoyed this brief overview of user experience.
This is a very cut-down version of our 1-day training course– ‘The What, Why and How of UX’.
Take the course, and learn more about:
• Personas
• Sitemaps
• Journey Mapping
• The UX toolbox
• UX ‘C’ words (Context & Constraints!)
• The $300m button!
Ask me for more details!
ian@futuredream.net
User Experience – a brief overview