4 UX documents required by a user experience designer

When it comes to user experience-related documentation, wireframes and prototypes are undoubtedly among the most important. But it's worth noting that the user experience covers more than that, and they're just the beginning. In fact, we found that there are also four documents that are extremely useful in everyday user experience design. The birth of these four kinds of documents is to help designers easier to understand users, more convenient to make the design decisions, to create excellent design and successful products.

In today's article, I will explain to you in detail why these seemingly easy to ignore "accessory" is really the designer's necessary thing. To learn more about designer documents and tools, read Uxpin's full guide to UX design processes and documentation.

　　1. Persona

Of the four documents, I first introduce the most recommended persona.

Persona the word itself has a role, image, mask of meaning. Your persona documentation (controlled in 2~5) usually needs to include your target users. As a fictional role in persona, its attributes and characteristics are set based on product research and user orientation, and are used as "ideal users" in the subsequent design process, which is essentially a placeholder. As a character set, it will contain personal information, much more than age and income information. The goal of the persona document is to use roles to verify how your target users feel about your design.

In this case, persona has been shown to significantly improve the end-user experience of products and designs.

The key to ensuring effective persona is prior research,

As described in the usability testing guide, such tests typically include quantitative and qualitative testing, and qualitative research typically includes user interviews, field trips, and even journaling, which are the best way to understand the user's thinking process. Quantitative tests also include analytical tests, but they are aimed at more quantifiable indicators, and the resulting results are more abstract and straightforward.

When you start your research, you can gradually build a real-world role document. Although different project requirements vary, the reference to the Uxpin template suggests that each role contains the following:

Photo: Almost every character should have an image, usually a group of photos. There are pictures that can help you think about them as real characters.

Profile: Usually you need to add the basic personal information of a character to this place.

Personality: There are many forms of personality, many branches, you can use a series of keywords to define the character and attributes of a character, you can also use a detailed discussion to define his mental state.

Platforms used: Which platform does the user prefer, iOS or Android? Are they familiar with each platform? What are they trying to avoid?

Goal (Motivation): In this link you should explore the user's three goals: life goals, experience goals and ultimate goals. Note that the ultimate goal of this local user is the most important.

Impact: Which products and brands have an impact on this role? In fact, this factor will largely affect his expectations of the site, behavioral preferences, personal decisions.

Preference: This is another way to enrich the characters, which is an important reference for the design optimization of specific users.

Maxim: This is actually an optional entry, and some people are influenced by maxims that affect people's decisions, actions, and expectations.

When a character is set up, with a persona document, you will feel that there is one more object to study in the room, and that design decisions can be more targeted.

2. Empathy Map

Empathy map, which we call empathy maps, is like a lightweight persona document that can be used in a tight resource situation. Empathy Map removes the character and character part of the persona and focuses more on the user's feelings in a given situation.

Tadpull describes the best process for making a empathy map and includes a free set of templates to help you start making documents.

Initial settings: Collect a group of test users, or assign a specific role to each member of your team. Then, prepare a special color post-it for each role.

Ask a question: Ask a series of seemingly broader questions, such as "Why do you use this site", which should be relatively open, such as "How do you choose the site you want to browse".

Note Map: As the answer grows, choose the post-it notes that belong to your color, record the answers, and paste them into specific areas.

Simplified map: Browse through all the notes, keep the best and most useful parts down, others put forward.

Take a break: After completing the above section, take a break, precipitate a thought. Remember that stickers made up of maps are best kept in public areas and are always reminded.

Define goal: At the bottom of the area there is a need to fill up the place, "___ needs to reach the goal of ____, because ____", now you should be able to understand the target user's ideas, to add their situation. The last space in each sentence is to fill out the reason, and this part needs special attention, because this part of your design can lead to critical reflection.

In Uxpin, we often upload the empathy Map to the app we designed so that everyone can comment and fill out suggestions. If you use slack or other collaborative tools, you can do similar things.

　3. User Scenario

If persona is helping you design a character in a story, then user scenario is the script of the story.

Scenario is the meaning of the script, let's call this document the user script. User scripts are usually designed around a specific goal. For example, the next day is Mother's Day, to book a gift for mother. The goal is clear, to achieve the goal, users need to click a few times button, go which process, how long it takes, how to integrate emotions in the process, throughout. After the entire user process has been predefined, the designer is confident about the UI and UX design.

Shlomo Goltz. "Close View Personas: detailed introduction and working principle (Part I)"

There are several different types of user scripts, such as you can enumerate all the technical details, including the pages involved in the entire process of user operation. Of course, you can also focus more on the user's own feelings, in which case the user script is closer to a story than the previous data table.

When you build your script, you should think more about the user-related factors than the best process and the most preferred decisions for you.

Behavior: What are their quirks when users interact with the site? Do they log on when they open the site, or do they log in when they need it? Are they still on other sites?

Motivation: Why do users want to achieve this goal? How much are they willing to endure?

Environment: Where does the user open the site, home, company or on the road? Are they using computers, mobile phones or other mobile devices? Are they distracted at the same time?

External factors: What is the speed of network access? Are there any other restrictions?

It's also particularly important that you try to visualize what the user wants to achieve. The more complete the user's role build, the more accurate the script can be built.

The best advice for users is not to try to refine each idea into a script, and stick to the most important "plot" to make a precise sketch.

　4. Customer Journey Map

This last document we call "user Travel map". This document is similar to the user script at the door, but it spans a lot more than the former and runs through the design of the experience. Designers can have a deeper understanding of the product's background to better design, and after the product is put into use is not the final end, which is the reason for such a large span.

The user travel map will cover all the information about role information, user scripts, and empathy maps. This is not to make the user travel map into a hodgepodge, but to the user's personality and user flow, interaction process together to see the problem, each stage of different links, are involved in different emotions and emotions.

In general, the user travel map can be presented as a chart, and generally in Uxpin, we will pay attention to the following links:

Goals: What goals do they want to achieve at each stage?

Expectation: What does the user think will happen? What does the user feel when the action occurs, or is it appropriate or inappropriate?

Process: How do they want to complete the process? What about their actual operation?

Experience Rating: How does the user rating each phase experience?

Advantage: Does the user like this process? Which parts are good to design?

Cons: What parts of the link do users dislike? How did the problem occur?

Improvement: Based on the information provided above, how should we enhance the user experience?

In fact, specific details, or depending on your company volume and the size of the product. The design team and the development team work together in small companies, and the entire UX design can take a lightweight route. However, if you are a large company, you may need to consider more to ensure the integrity and patency of information communication.

　　Conclusion

If you're a new team designer, ask others whether the UX design process or related documentation is involved in the design process, and if not, tailor the process to your product to add the corresponding documentation. After all, they can make you know more about users and build better products. These documents can be made with the help of Uxpin service, interested, you might as well try it.