UI/UX Design Thinking and Sketching

Study Notes

Design thinking is a broad term that encompasses the entire system development lifecycle process, as well as a narrow term that refers to the creative human activity of synthesizing new ideas.

Ecological Perspective:
- Focuses on how the system or product works within its external environment
- Considers how the system or product is used in its context and interacts with its environment
- 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
- Involves a task and intention view, where user and system come together
- Includes sensory, cognitive, and physical actions
Emotional Perspective:
- Focuses on how users operate the system or product
- Involves a task and intention view, where user and system come together
- Includes sensory, cognitive, and physical actions

A persona is a pretend user or a "hypothetical archetype" that represents a specific person in a specific work role and sub-role
Built up from contextual data, a persona is a story and description of a specific individual who has a name, a life, and a personality

Ideation is an active, fast-moving collaborative group process for forming ideas for design
It is an activity that goes with design thinking; ideation is applied design thinking

Sketching is the rapid creation of freehand drawings expressing preliminary design ideas, focusing on concepts rather than details
Used to create a 3D design representation to show clients, customers, and implementers

A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world
A 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

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
Storyboards are used to represent interaction sequence designs and are like visual scenario sketches of envisioned interaction design solutions

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