We all know what a good user experience looks like and feels like, but it can be challenging to design products that deliver that good user experience to the people that use it. Fortunately, we know a few things that we can do to make it a lot easier on designers to ensure that the product that comes out the end delivers a good user experience. First, we follow an iterative prototyping process where we design multiple versions of the product, each time getting better and better. We apply a user-centered research and design approach to make sure that we're keeping users' needs and users capabilities and focus throughout the process. We need to understand a bit about human behavior to make sure that we're designing things that are likely to work and avoiding things that are likely to fail, and we make sure that we use a process that allows us to apply our common sense to ensure that the product is moving in the right direction. The reason that we iterate is because we know that we're not going to get it right the first time. We want to fail as fast as we can, get it wrong as quickly and as often as possible, so that we can learn from our mistakes and get it less wrong each time. So, that as we're moving through the process, we're designing a product that's getting better and better and doing a better job of delivering a good user experience. The iterative design process that we apply in user experience can be thought of in this way. We think of it as three phases involving assessment, design, and building. So, in the assessment phase, initially, what we're doing is we're assessing what users are currently doing and what their needs are so that we can understand the design space and the problems that they're facing so that we can design products that will address those needs. In the design phase, we take what we've learned in the initial assessment and come up with ideas, lots of ideas for how we might deliver a product that solves the problem that we've identified in the assessment. In the build phase, we take those design ideas or a subset of those design ideas and we build them into prototypes or some representation that we can use to communicate a particular idea, so that we can then use it to get feedback on whether that idea is headed in the right direction or in the wrong direction. We can then apply assessment methods like user testing or formal inspection methods to see if that prototype is leading towards a good user experience or bad user experience. Then, we take what we learn from that, and we repeat it all again. We go back to the drawing board, we designed new ideas, we build new prototypes, we perform new assessments, and we continue this until we're satisfied that the product is ready to go. Another way to visualize this process that helps to show how the process could be iterative but still progress towards an ultimate endpoint is to view it as a spiral. Where we start on the outside, with the assessment phase, and we traverse around the spiral through the design, build, and assessment phase multiple times until we ultimately reach the center which is the endpoint, the final design. The other thing that's nice about this visualization is it gives you a sense of, you're zeroing in on a target and you're getting closer and closer as you progress, or the design is getting more and more finalized and hopefully better as time goes on. So, we can see from this that an iterative design process includes both user experience research as well as user experience design. It's critical that both research and design are used in a balanced way to iterate towards a successful solution. So, for UX research, there's a set of methods, well-known methods that can be applied to understand user needs and evaluate prototypes as they're being developed. So, for example, we often conduct interviews to understand more about users' needs and how they currently do things. We conduct observations to actually watch what people do and how they do it to understand things that they might not be able to tell us very effectively through interviews. Sometimes we conduct surveys, especially when we're wanting to reach a very large audience and we need to understand characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes of that large audience and we're not able to reach out to every member of that audience because there's just too many of them. We use user testing to take a prototype or a system that we've developed and figure out whether or not people are able to accomplish what they need with that prototype or system. We also apply a range of inspection methods where we can use best practices and knowledge about what works and what doesn't to take a close look at a prototype or representation of a system to determine whether it's on track for delivering a good user experience or not. We also apply a set of design methods throughout the UX process. So, for example, developing personas, and scenarios, and user stories to represent the types of people that need to use the system and the types of things that they need to be able to accomplish with the system. We also use sketching and ideation to generate lots of different possible solutions so that we know that we have a lot that we can choose from so that we can get the best ideas out there. We use storyboarding to think through what the interaction with the system might be. So, we can see whether it makes sense and whether that's going to be something that results in a good user experience. We use mapping and navigation designed to map out all the different things that you can do with the system and make sure that they all make sense together. We conduct a comparative research where we go out and look at the competition or other examples of products that are trying to accomplish similar things, to try to understand what are the best practices out there and what are the things that we might want to avoid. We build multiple different types of prototypes from low to middle, to high fidelity prototypes throughout the process to put those design ideas into a form that we can use for getting effective feedback in using for assessments like user testing. As I said, it's important to understand a little bit about how people work. So that when we're going through that design and prototyping process, we're creating stuff that's more likely to be effective in the end. So, understanding things like well, what can people perceive? How does the human visual system work for example? So, how do people extract information from visual stimuli? How can you design a screen or a web page so that people could actually understand what's on it? How do people do things? How do people act in the world? How do they decide how to act in the world and how do they process information about the results of their action? How do they know if they're going in the right direction or if they need to take a different path so that we can design systems that guide people in the direction that they need to go? How does emotion play a role? Or how when and why does emotion affect decision making and what role does emotion play in user experience so that we can design systems that produce satisfying, positive emotions in our users. Finally, we want to set ourselves up so that we can use our common sense to design systems that will work. In a process that puts you in touch with user needs and practices, in user responses to possible designs through user testing, and other methods, we'll allow you to see what works and what doesn't. So, that's how we make user experience easy. We make it easy on ourselves as designers of systems to produce products that deliver a great user experience. We follow an iterative prototyping process, we apply user-centered research and design methods throughout the process, we understand a bit about human behavior so that we can steer the process in a positive direction, and we set ourselves up to be able to apply common sense so that we are constantly moving towards a product that will, in the end, deliver a great user experience.
