UX Design Initialization
User Experience Enhancement for Applications
The Design Mindset
User Experience
User Experience
Involves a person’s behaviours, attitudes and
emotions about using a particular product,
system or services
The Practical, experiential, affective, meaningfull
and valuable aspects of Human-computer
interaction (HCI)
ISO 9241-210
“a person's perceptions and responses that result
from the use or anticipated use of a product,
system or service”
Influences
To address the variety, factors influencing user
experience have been classified into 4
categories:
User’s state
Previous experience
System properties
Situation
What should you do?
Study typical users (identify users)
Study the contexts (NOT contents!)
Interactions
Study user emotions
Creative and Innovation
From nothing to new?
From existing to improvement?
The 10 Myths of Innovation
The myth of epiphany (靈光一閃)
The myth that we know history
The myth of a method
The myth we love new ideas
The myth of the lone inventor
The myth that good ideas are rare
The 10 Myths of Innovation
The myth your boos knows more than you
The myth the best idea wins
The myth that problems are less interesting than
solutions
The myth that innovation is always good
Do, or Not Do? Because…
YOU ARE FEAR!!
7 Ideas on how to overcome
fear & become more creative
1. Know that you're in good company
2. When it comes to social media, think self-expression, not self-
promotion
3. Coffee is magic
4. Train yourself, a la Pavlov, to associate creative work with pleasure
5. Work alone (or alone together)
6. Work at night when your cortisol levels are lower
7. Strengthen your backbone and therefore your confidence, in small
steps
Hero’s Journey
A pattern of narrative identified by the American
scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama,
storytelling, myth, religious ritual and
psychological development
It can help you to identify the flow of your system
The archetype
Archetypes = recurring patterns of human
behaviours, symbolized by standard types of
characters in stories
Heros = Central figures in stories
Shadows = Your enemies
Mentors = The hero’s guide or guiding principles
Herald = One who brings
Threshold Guardians = important turning points
The archetype
Shapeshifters = The changes
Tricksters = Something urging us to change
Allies = characters who help the hero through the
change
Beyond the hero’s journey
The stages of hero’s journey
Innovative models with
hero’s journey
Working definition – Plot vs. Story
Plot (What and Why) – the structure
Story (How) – the semantics
Tell the stories
Stable and structural element for consistently
identify
Myth in Hero’s Journey
There is one storytelling form to rule them all
Story structures can cross borders
Map the structures! No data-points
Before you go to the next
chapter
You may have some ideas now, but first…
Ask the products or services in 6Ws
Because UX is everything that affects a user’s interaction
with that product
Takes the user’s needs into account at every stage of the
product lifecycle (Design, Build, Launch, Measure)
Try to ask the users:
What are you thinking?
Why did that confuse you?
Where would you click next?
And…
1. You are doing some of this stuff already
2. It is a process!
3. It is NOT hard!
4. It is challenging! Rewarding! Pays well! LOW
barrier of entry
5. AND Visual design is ONLY part of the UX!
Discovery Strategy
User Experience
Dig Deep
Before starting screens mock up, take some time
to discover the key information
Stakeholder Interviews
Customer Research
Stakeholder Interviews
This is the first step towards synthesizing the vision for
the product, how it aligns with the overall business
goals, and how success (and failure) will be
measured.
Customer Research
can be detailed and exhaustive, or quick and
dirty, or any level in between
The first trick to getting to good results is sourcing
and screening the right participants
Research tips
Do the recruiting yourself
Focus on behavior, not demographics
Be as generous as you can with incentive/honorarium/compensation
Be flexible about days, times, number of hours
Get participants to opt in to the study
Remember that every sample has biases
Be genuinely, authentically interested in the people you want to
observe without being creepy
Follow up
Combination of research
tactics
story mapping homework
tasks logging
participation Stimuli
demonstration
role playing
exercises
Build Consensus with Personas and
Customer Journey Maps
User Experience
Building consensus with team
After user research, you need to sum up the result
for analyzing the case
This stage, you can understand what kind of
technology (if suitable) to be applied in the case
Personas
Focused and concise user models that use for
decision making
Construct the model based on user research
data to represent a class of target users
Personas = Define target user
for user centered design
Personas did not achieve that goal
Use for learning the user and high level
descriptions
Why Personas
People don’t read large documents
Using a short user model to focuses only on the
details that affect design decisions
Example
Only 5 things should do
Keep it simple and focused
Make a user model, not a life story
Use them when making decisions
Train your team to use a simple process
Be mindful of politics
Customer Journey Maps
Journey maps can provide depth to your
persona by illustrating the customer’s current
path with the product or service.
Useful for (re)designing a single application;
essential for cross platform design
Example
Summary
For improving customer’s experience
Personas and Journey Maps can remove the barrier
between stakeholders’ vision and customers’ needs
Get aligned on who and what you are designing for
Solidify project objectives
Conceptual Designs with Storyboard
User Experience
Questions
You will prepare to create an app making users
happy quickly? Or;
You will do something that can help people but
processing the tasks with painful?
Seeks for solution
Review the studies in personas and customer
journey map
Go broad and brainstorm possible solutions
Do NOT think technically infeasible or too
expensive in this stage
Think: Try starting sentences with “Wouldn’t it be
cool if insert persona name here could just…?”
Storyboarding
Offer a quick way to get feedback
Artistic skill is NOT required, you can use comics
found on the web (e.g.: [Link]
Use storyboards when you want to keep
discussions focused on people and their goals,
compared to flow diagrams
Test early and often
Validate these storyboards with your users
Take pens and paper to these session and let
participants sketch too
Conceptual Designs
You may have finalize your design with the
mental model
Now should give the user through the interface of
the product by conceptual model
Conceptual Design based on
mental models
If the product’s conceptual model doesn’t match the
user’s mental model, then the user will find the product
hard to learn and use.
If the designers of the conceptual model didn’t take the
user’s mental model into account then it is highly likely
that the product will be hard to learn and use.
If there are multiple user groups (people who have used a
Kindle before, people who have never read books
electronically, etc.) and the conceptual model is
designed to match just one mental model, then the other
users will find the device hard to learn and use.
Conceptual Design based on
mental models
If the conceptual model was not really designed, but is just a
reflection of the underlying hardware or software or
database, then the conceptual model will not match the
user’s mental model very well, and the users will find the
device hard to learn and use.
Sometimes you know that the mental model of one or more
user groups will not fit the conceptual model, and you want
to change the user’s mental model so that it matches the
conceptual model you have designed. For example, you
know that people who have only read real, physical books
will not have an accurate mental model of reading books on
the iPad. You can use a short training video to change their
mental model before the iPad even arrives at their door. In
fact, the main purpose of training should be to adjust a user’s
mental model to fit the conceptual model of the product.
Draw from experience
Understand the design patterns and flows in
different industry
Make sure to look outside your industry for
inspiration
You may try Zaki Warfel’s 6-8-5 system to define 6-
8 concepts in 5 minutes, then narrow it down to
2-3 concepts for testing
Prototype and test
You can stay low fidelity with paper prototypes, or
use a tool like Balsamiq Mockups to create a digital
version. The conceptual designs should focus on
flow, not on specific UI controls. You can use the
design scenario from your winning storyboard as a
script for testing out the concepts
App Map (Alpha)
Once you get a solid concept designed, you
can start the app map. This is another dirty
deliverable, “not because it is imprecise or lacks
details, but because it can change”, Chris
Farnum at IA Summit 2011.
This map will help prioritize UI design and
development efforts since it highlights the
screens for the most important flows
