Design Thinking and User Experience UI/UX Module 2

Design Thinking, Ideation, and Sketching

• Design thinking is a broad term that encompasses the entire system development lifecycle process.
• It can also refer to the creative human activity of synthesizing new ideas to make up parts of an interaction design.

Design Perspectives

• Ecological Perspective:
  • Focuses on how the system or product works within its external environment.
  • Considers how the system interacts with its environment and users in their context.
  • Includes social interaction and long-term phenomenological aspects of usage as part of one's lifestyle.
• Interaction Perspective:
  • Focuses on how users operate the system or product.
  • Is a task and intention view, where user and system come together.
  • Involves sensory, cognitive, and physical actions.
• Emotional Perspective:
  • Focuses on how users operate the system or product.
  • Is a task and intention view, where user and system come together.
  • Involves sensory, cognitive, and physical actions.

User Personas

• A persona is a pretend user or a hypothetical archetype.
• Represents a specific person in a specific work role and sub-role, with specific user class characteristics.
• Built up from contextual data, a persona is a story and description of a specific individual with a name, life, and personality.

Ideation

• Ideation is an active, fast-moving collaborative group process for forming ideas for design.
• It is an activity that goes with design thinking; you might say that ideation is a tool of design thinking.

Sketching

• Sketching is the rapid creation of freehand drawings expressing preliminary design ideas, focusing on concepts rather than details.

Mental Model and Conceptual Model

• A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world.
• The conceptual design as it is manifest in the system is an implementation of this mapping and can be flawed or incomplete.
• A flawed conceptual design leads to a mismatch in the user's mental model.

Storyboards

• A storyboard is a sequence of visual "frames" illustrating the interplay between a user and an envisioned system.
• Storyboards bring the design to life in graphical "clips," freeze-frame sketches of stories of how people will work with the system.
• They are like visual scenario sketches, envisioned interaction design solutions, showing sequences of flow from frame to frame.

Design Influencing User Behavior

• Slanty design is an approach that extends user-centered design by focusing on the things people should (and should not) be able to do with the product(s) behind the design.
• Design is a conversation between designers and users about both desired and undesired usage outcomes.