Learn UX and usability from overseas designers

First, the user experience and its business value

User experience, refers to the user in the use of products, systems, services, the process of producing a purely subjective feeling. From the Internet to the development of mobile Internet is now so mature stage, more and more enterprises, consumers began to fancy "user experience."

So what is the business value of the user experience for the enterprise?

　　1. Increase revenue

The availability of products, systems can be improved to enable users to find the products they need, put into the shopping cart and complete the purchase, can solve the sales obstacles, such as transportation, return, maintenance and other issues.

Your design makes products/sites better use, even if you need to help users can also be completed through the site, so you can save a lot of help or support services resources.

When your design makes the user's life easier, more satisfying, and more like it, they may be willing to pay an extra fee.

All these can achieve the increase in revenue.

　　2. Reduce expenditure

Spend your time developing the functionality that your users need, instead of doing a bunch of useless things to users, identify and optimize usability issues as early as possible before product development, such as the prototype design phase, and reduce the risk of failure due to not understanding the requirements properly; Minimizing or eliminating documents can also reduce expenses.

　　Ii. 4 Dimensions of usability assessment

Functional functionality: Whether the product is useful. For example, bottle opener, whether can open a bottle.

Easy to learn learnablity: whether the product can be used directly, or that need to read the instructions will be used.

Flexibility Flexiblity: Whether a product can do something other than make a major task. For example, the bottle opener, whether it can use the left hand, but also the right hand operation, whether can open a glass bottle, and can open cans.

Industrial design industry: It can be understood whether the design is beautiful enough. Take the bottle opener as an example, at a friend gathering, whether can proudly take out on the table, or can only hide in a corner of the kitchen with a variety of messy things mixed together. For Internet products, this can be understood as visual design, graphic design.

　　Iii. three elements that affect availability

Continue to bottle opener as an example: in order to determine which of the 4 bottle opener most Easy-to-use, which is the most difficult to use, looking for 4 different types of users to do research.

The end result is that different users choose the easy to use, difficult bottle opener are not the same, even the same bottle opener there are two extreme choice, some people think it best use, some people think it is the most difficult to use, the so-called plus honey B arsenic.

Why is there such a phenomenon? Because there are three main factors that determine product availability: User, Environment, task/use goal.

Back to the bottle opener example, the old man, hope that the bottle opener labor-saving, with no pain; families with children hope that the bottle opener is safe enough to avoid accidental injury to children, and some families use bottle opener to open champagne, and some may open cans. Different users, the use of the environment is different, they have to consider the standards are also different, want to complete the task through the product also vary.

　　Iv. Six principles of usability

1, the design is based on the user, task, the environment of a clear understanding on the basis of

The task is what the user wants to do with the product. How can you understand the three points of users, tasks, and environments? It is recommended to observe their behavior directly in the user's use scenario, leave the office, visit the user, and observe how they do "the product that you designed is involved".

2, users need to participate in the whole process of design and development to

Methods: To site research, to understand the needs of users, to show users early morning design concept manuscript, usability test prototype.

3, through the user-centric evaluation, design is constantly driven and improved

Even at the development stage, target users should actually use demo or prototyping to accomplish real tasks, and we have to observe, record, and analyze their performance and feedback.

4, the design process is the continuous iterative cycle

For example: Design-Test-think solution-redesign until meeting user needs, availability assessment standards.

5, design to consider all factors affecting the user experience

The user experience is not just to make a system work, it involves the user's perception and response to the use of products, systems, and services.

6, design team, need to include a multidisciplinary skills and perspective

For example: User researcher, interactive designer, content designer, front-end development engineer

　　V. International standards for usability and user experience ISO9241

1, the planning of the user-centric design process

2, understand and express the use of the situation

3, clear user needs

4, product design solutions to meet user needs (can design a variety of solutions, and then evaluate which is the most appropriate)

5, to assess whether the design to meet user needs (if the assessment is not appropriate, may return to the 2nd, 3, 4 steps to restart)

6, design the solution to meet the needs of users

This article is mainly based on the theory, first share so much, please look forward to the next-situational research contextual inquiry.

Welcome attention to Sister (7 years of engineering female, 4 years interactive design) of the micro-letter public number: