Actual availability: The appearance of the software

Welcome to "actual Availability". This is the first of a series of columns that focuses on the design of user experience (UX). In the past, the user experience was not given priority in most development projects, but it is now different. Today, end users have a wealth of experience using the WEB and software that they want to design to be easy to use and suitable for workflow. This column will show you how to make this kind of design.

Although UX design is a great development in this area, the integration of UX design and development process has stalled. UX itself is a highly iterative and agile process, so this is a bit of a surprise. However, as the development community continues to join, we expect the development framework to turn more attention to UX design and its key contacts.

The author of this article is our two-charlie and Ambrose, we are user experience designers, but it is through a variety of ways to achieve this area. Charlie was trained in cognitive psychology, and Ambrose was previously a developer. We are all keen on UX, but we have a different point of entry for its research. Our common goal is to develop a design approach that is well suited to the development process and sees good UX as an important factor in creating successful interactive products.

So, what is the user experience?

The term "user experience" refers to the subjective experience a user obtains when interacting with a product. We often talk about the good service of a restaurant or the bad environment of a movie theater, and these are some informal discussions about usability. When designing or evaluating the user experience for an interactive product, we need to understand the product and discuss it in a more structured way.

For UX designers, success means creating the products that are practical, usable, and user-required. A product must be able to provide value to the user before it can be called a utility product. In terms of development terminology, the product must implement the corresponding function. Available products refer to easy to learn and Easy-to-use products. The product that the user needs is the product that the user desires to obtain. The greater the user's demand for a product, the more time and effort the user voluntarily spends on it. Enthusiastic users are the best promoter of the product.

Not just the appearance of landscaping

UX is often mistaken for visual design, which is associated with color, font, and aesthetics. Of course, graphic design is part of the user experience, but the UX design process is much more than that. From the core of UX, UX is the effect of implementing functionality through interaction between the user and the system.

Functional specifications are always part of the development. People's view of traditional design is too simplistic (this is undeniable), that is, business analysts make a series of requirements, which will then be conveyed to the developer. The developer then determines how to implement these requirements and produce the final product. However, traditional development methods often ignore the analysis of task flow.

Business analysts tend to care about the functionality of the product, while UX designers are more concerned with how to render the functionality themselves through the UI. Because the user's skills and requirements are different, UX designers determine which user groups they need to support. The designer collects data about these user populations and creates personas (fictional user characters based on real user data) to help focus on the design process. By meeting and observing, UX designers will learn about the tasks that users perform, how they perform tasks, and the words they use when describing these tasks. You can summarize this data as a scenario, user case, or storyboard.

Once the user population and task flow are recorded, UX designers can begin to design. Design is usually a very iterative process, just beginning with a highly conceptual concept, and then continuously improve in the design process.

Usability testing is a design quality assurance (QA) approach that identifies problems with design concepts. Typically, participants are selected from the identified user population and perform specific tasks as requested. At an early stage, it's possible to simply draw the UI on paper, and then the participants point to each control and describe how to perform the task. In later stages, high fidelity prototypes are often used.