June, 2010 Utah Product Management Association presentation, "Creating products that people love" by Steve Ballard, Director of User Experience for attask.com.
4. Why not just make products
people don’t love? It’s easier
Capability
Desirability
Product
Viability
• Makes users feel stupid
• Causes users to make big mistakes
• Requires too much effort
• Is not engaging or enjoyable
5. In a mature industry, design
innovation is essential
6. Believe it or not, product features
become less important
happy user peak
user happiness
“I Rule!” “Guess I better look
at the manual.”
“Where the heck
“Cool!” did they put that?”
“I’m so glad they “Now I can’t even do the
added this.” one simple thing
I bought this for...”
“Nice, but I
wish I could do more...” “ I Suck!”
number of features
9. DESIGN
(is a big word)
“Design is to design a design to produce a design”
– John Heskett
10. We design things people use
“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose
meaningful order.”
- Victor Papanek
• Gooddesign ensures usefulness, usability and emotional
connection
• Design is about planning what to build before you build it
• Design allows permission to explore
• Design requires collaboration with the builders
11. Discussion
What is design?
How does design
happen in your organization?
12. What is User Experience Design?
“The user experience development process is all about
ensuring that no aspect of the user’s experience with
your site [product] happens without your conscious
explicit intent. This means taking into account every
possibility and every action the user is likely to take and
understanding the user’s expectations at every step of
the way through that process”
– Jesse James Garrett
The Elements of User Experience
13. What is User Experience Design?
Visual
Interaction
Interface
Design
Design
Industrial
Design
14. Meet the UXD Cast?
(more on this later)
UX
Interaction Designer Visual
Designer Designer
Industrial
Designer
15. Meet the UXD Cast?
(more on this later)
UX
Interaction Designer Visual
Designer Designer
Both
(rare)
Designs product Designs products’
behavior visual appearance
(usefulness usability) (clarity, emotion brand)
16. IxD VD
Interaction Design
“Every moment of every day millions of people send
e-mail, talk on mobile phones, instant message each
other, record TV shows with TiVo, and listen to their
iPods. All of these things are made possible by good
engineering. But it’s interaction design that makes
them usable, useful, and fun.”
– Dan Saffer
Designing for Interaction
17. What Interaction Designers Do?
User Centered Design
• User research
Interaction
• Personas Design
• User Flows & Scenarios
• Brainstorm, Ideation Sketching
• Wireframes Prototypes
• Usability testing design validation
18. User Centered Design
User Research
• Contextual Inquiry (Ethnographic Interviews)
• Be an Anthropologist
• Let them teach you, have a beginners mind
• Go to them, let them do the talking, take notes and photos
• Looking for patterns in goals, behavior, environment, etc.
• Good Designers will be suspect of surveys and focus groups
to gather information about peoples behaviors and desires
19. “Any attempt to reduce human behavior to statistics is
likely to overlook important nuances, which make an
enormous difference to the design of products”
- Alan Cooper
21. User Centered Design
Personas
•A precisely defined fictional user based on the
patterns we observed (goals being the most important)
• Provides a precise unambiguous definition of the
“user” (avoids the “elastic user” problem)
• Helpavoid designing for one’s self or
designing for needs that don’t really exist
• We can more effectively design for just one
person than for a group
•A communication tool to build commitment
around a design
22. User Centered Design
Personas
“If you try to design an
automobile that pleases every
possible driver, you end up with a
car with every possible feature,
but that pleases nobody.”
- Alan Cooper
24. User Centered Design
User Flows & Scenarios
• Clearer picture if activities are getting your persona closer to
their actual goals or not
• Betterunderstand users’ mental (how does the user actually
think about they way something works)
•Aprototype of words that describes what your persona’s day
would be like using the product you imagine
• Helps stakeholders envision what the product may be like.
(great for getting buy-in)
26. User Centered Design
Brainstorm, Ideation Sketching
IDEO’s 7 Rules
• Be Visual
• Defer judgment
• Encourage Wild Ideas
• Build on the Ideas of Others
• Go for Quantity
• One Conversation at a Time
• Stay Focused on the Topic
28. User Centered Design
Wireframes Prototypes
Wireframing is at the heart of Interaction Design, and it’s important
that it is done independently of Visual Design
and UI Development
34. Meet the UXD Cast?
(I told you we’d come back to this)
UX
Interaction Designer Visual
Designer Designer
35. How to hire a real UX Designer
• Many designers with no UX or IxD experience are calling
themselves UX or IxD Designers - don’t get fooled
• Great print designers often make very poor Visual Interface
Designers
• Reach out to them where they the real ones congregate
(IxDA, UPA, UIE, Adaptive Path, Conferences)
• If
they are any good they will already be employed and be
making good money.
36. What to look for
• Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio
- that contains good examples of
research, personas, flows and wireframes.
• Askthem to describe why they made the design decisions
they did. Have them explain their wireframes.
• Give them a written design problem and have them sketch a
solution - design test to uncover design thinking skills
• Ask references specifically about IxD skills.
• Did I mention portfolio.