User Experience Design Fundamentals

UX Fundamentals and Project Brief

• The topic is UX fundamentals and project brief
• The presenter is Hussein Gaber, Head of Design
• The session is part of a Practical UX Camp
• UX design encompasses everything needed to create a product suitable for user needs

User Experience

• User experience (UX) encompasses everything considered when creating a product that meets user needs.
• This includes factors like how to think about the product and what actions to take.

Different UX Devices

• Devices include wearables, smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.
• Different devices need different user interactions and considerations like screen size, touch/gestures or cursor/keyboard.
• Screen sizes range from 3 inches to 27 inches

UX Matters

• Access to competitors is often just a tap or two away.
• UX is crucial because competition is readily accessible, reminding the importance of quality design.

Great User Experiences

• Great UX combines useful, usable, and desirable elements.
• Useful: Achieving a goal
• Usable: Easily performing tasks to reach a goal.
• Desirable: Enjoyment in performing the task

3 Products with Great Experiences

• Examples shown: messaging app, video calling app, and map application.
• These apps represent products with desirable and intuitive experiences.

User's ROI

• A useful product fulfills user needs.
• A less frustrating experience supports users' natural methods.
• Optimized products increase user efficiency and effectiveness.

UX Designer Characteristics

• Good UX designers listen attentively and analyze problems effectively.
• Designers should understand problems fully before solving them.
• Anticipate questions and be observant, putting themselves in the user's shoes.
• Communicate tasks clearly and find multiple solutions with explanations.
• Learn from mistakes to improve practice.

Understand the Problem Space

• Understanding the problem and its target audience is crucial.

Definitions

• Key terms: Product, Users, Stakeholders, and Problem Space.
• These terms are essential for defining the scope and purpose of the project.

Shared Understanding of the Problem

• The shared understanding of the problem is crucial, involving stakeholders, users and the problem space itself.
• Analyzing the problem will determine if it's solving the correct problem for the correct audience.
• Understanding the product's stakeholders and their assumptions is important.
• Understanding the product's users, their core needs, and what they consider success is vital.

Common Pitfalls

• Avoid early implementation ideas, creative possible solutions and research upfront.
• Prioritize understanding business requirements.
• Ensure identification of potential risks and assumptions.

Don't Forget

• Focus on asking the correct questions to solve problems effectively.
• Gain a thorough knowledge of what is known, and what is unknown.
• Concentrate on defining the problem accurately.

Useful Resources

• Defining audiences and their goals
• Determining if the right problem is being solved for the right audience.
• Considering user relationship to your product using the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.

Intro to UX Fundamentals

• Emphasizes the importance of specific principles in UX design.

Focus on the User

• Design for users, not for yourself.
• Understand their needs, motivations, and constraints.

Solve Real Problems

• Identify real problems that require user-centered solutions.

Strive for Simplicity

• Create a clear value proposition and ensure users understand benefits.
• Focus on user needs and remove roadblocks.

Do Research

• Understanding the product space and the strengths and weaknesses of competitors.
• Testing assumptions using users, even using friends and relatives as surrogates.

Adapt, Adapt, Adapt

• Product development is an ongoing process; adapt plans as you learn.

Iterative Process

• The product development process involves a cycle of thinking, checking and making.

Iterative Process (2)

• The product creation process involves discovery, design and testing loops.

UX Fundamentals

• Key aspects of UX design include: focus on the user, solve real problems, strive for simplicity, do research and adapt.

UX and UI

• Interaction design focuses on wireframes and prototypes.

• Information architecture covers organizational components.

• user research analyzes user behavior.

• Scenarios provide insights into user experience through examples.

• Visual design involves colors, graphic designers, layouts, and typography.

Interview Questions

• Session provides examples of interview questions to prepare for user interviews.
  • Tell us about yourself
  • What is UX design?
  • Favorite examples of good UX?
  • Difference between UX and UI?
  • Typical workflow.
  • How to handle negative feedback.

Project Brief

• Key aspects of defining project requirements and goals.
  • Using the waterfall model (requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance).

How to Start Tomorrow

• The three options for a new project launch: Simple, From Scratch, and Redesign.
• Preparing for a new project launch include having a call to discuss project targets, users and maturity.
• A template is provided in the product input.

Prepare for the Meeting

• Before the meeting, ensure preparation by connecting your charger; silencing notifications, and closing unrelated tabs/apps.
• Set expectations; have a summary before detailing your work.
• Ask questions before assuming something.

Client Interviews

• Key questions in client interviews include scope, goals, targeted users, timeframe, budget, and success metrics.

Introductory Meeting

• The design process will cover specific scenarios, including exploring service providers, considering weather conditions while suggesting/booking trips, completing the booking process to confirmation, scheduling bookings, payment options, and feedback/updates about reservations & cancellation policies.
• Relevant action items mentioned

How to Estimate Your Time

• Understanding required tasks, dividing the project into modules and headlines.
• Using different sizes (small/medium/large) of "T-shirts" for each headline.
• Detailing tasks into more granular components
• Estimating the time needed for each task.

Always Remember

• Prioritize the user experience.
• The user is not you.
• Listen to feedback and adapt accordingly.

What is Ideation?

• Ideation is the process of generating new ideas for a specific topic, without evaluating them.

Ideation Techniques

• Techniques to generate ideas like brainstorming.

How to Generate Good HMWs?

• Don'ts include being too generic, combining problems, writing negatively or solving symptoms
• Dos include being specific and focus on the problem's root cause

Using AI? Why Not?

• User onboarding suggestions such as keeping it short and sweet, showing value, and considering visual aids are given.
• Utilizing progressive disclosure is also encouraged.

UX Research

• Emphasis on learning and having fun during the UX research process.
• Overview of Walaa Mohamed as the UX certified manager leading the session.

After Discovery

• Identifying the problem, stakeholder needs, and assumptions about the users.

What do we need to do?

• Next steps after discovery.

What did Sarah do?

• Observational study
• User Interviews
• Competition Analysis

What is User Research?

• Understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations.
• Qualitative, including interviews, surveys, and usability evaluations
• Creating user-centered products.
• A systematic process to understand user interactions.

Reasons for Use User Research

• Making informed decisions tailored for the target audience based on their insights.
• Enhancing user satisfaction and reducing risks associated with the product.
• Identifying potential biases and evaluating solutions objectively.

Main Types of Research

• Primary research (original data, higher quality, more time-consuming)
• Secondary research (existing data, lower quality, quicker and cost-effective)

When to Use Primary Research

• Discovery phase
• Design phase
• After project launch.

User Interviews Methods and Tools

• Guided interviews
• In-depth exploration of user preferences, thoughts, and feelings.

Focus Group

• Informal technique to assess user needs and feelings, gathering insights from participants

Surveys

• A set of questions targeting specific user groups, exploring attitudes and preferences.

Field Study

• Observing actions in user context (real-life situations).

Diary Study

• Qualitative data collection method for user experiences, activities and behaviors over time

Card Sorting

• Grouping labels to understand user perceptions & organization.

Usability Testing

• Identifying issues in design, user interface and/or workflow issues.

A/B Testing

• Determining different design variations via experimentation and random sampling.

Tree Testing

• Evaluating website or application topic hierarchy.

Eye Tracking

• Tracking eye movements to understand what users focus on.

Analytics

• Quantitative method to observe user interactions with products

Competitive Analysis Phases

• Discovery phase: Gaining familiarity with the industry
• Research phase: Detailed analysis of competitors.

Types of Competitors

• Direct competitors: Offer the same features and target the same users.
• Indirect competitors: Offer different features or target different users, solving a similar problem.

Finding Competitors

• Mobile apps: Use app stores (e.g., Apple App Store, Google Play Store)
• Websites: Use search engines (e.g., Google) and competitor analysis tools (e.g., Capterra).

Analyze Competitors

• Analyzing the app/website as a user, making notes of pros/cons and taking screenshots of the key features.
• Considering customer reviews and understanding their feedback on the competitor product.

Important Factors in Competitive Analysis

• Features offered
• Tone and style of communication (formal/informal)
• User feedback.

Collect Data and Make Presentation

• Collecting data from all competitors to present to your team.
• Analyzing data to generate recommendations that can be incorporated into the product development plan

Attendance metrics

• Metrics that show attendance information per day

My Profile

• Whole information about employees; structured format

Case Study

• Case study on employee self-service systems

User Interview Steps

• Planning for the interview by creating background, goals, main questions, script, warm-up, scenarios and wrap-up steps.
• Conduct the interview using the created script
• Evaluate and analyze data collected.

Questions (Scenarios) Examples

• Interview questions for scenarios for different product areas like pet supplies, cleaning services, employee apps or food subscriptions.

User Journey Map

 - The journey map visually represents a user's experience with a product, service, or process.

User Personas

• Fictional representations with identified needs, frustrations, and goals to target specific user groups.

Empathy Maps

• A visual tool to analyze and understand user motivations, actions, thoughts and emotions.

UX Competitive Analysis

• Comparing competitors to understand better strengths and weaknesses.

Agenda

• Meeting agenda structure, focusing on "What, Why, and How."

What is Competitive Analysis?

• A process that compares digital product interfaces to identify competitor strengths and weaknesses; focuses on design and interaction.

Why Competitive Analysis?

• For business owners: Understanding market strengths, weaknesses, for identifying user needs.
• For designers: Identifying the best design practices in the market, understanding competitor's pain points

Competitive Analysis Phases

• Discovery phase: Getting to know the industry
• Research phase: Detailed analysis of competitors per feature.

Types of Competitors

• Direct competitors: Same features, serving same users, solving the same problems.
• Indirect competitors: Different features, different users, solving similar problems.

How to Find Competitors

• Using app/website stores or specific tools (e.g., Capterra) to identify competitors.

Analyze Competitors

• Using the application as a user, taking screenshots of the product and analyzing reviews from users

Important Considerations

• Do not simply copy competitor's design, but learn from them
• Involve users for better analysis
• Include screenshots and document the findings
• Prepare recommendations for your design based on your analysis.

Know your Product First

• Start by studying the existing product's features, users, and its place in the market, including competitive advantage of the product over other similar products
• Start by analyzing the product's existing features.

Find the Right Competitors

• Start by asking stakeholders about competitors from their point of view
• Conduct your research to discover more competitors and solutions in your area.
• Use app stores and websites or tools (e.g., Capterra) to find competitors.

Analyze the Competitors(2)

• Employing the product interface as a user to thoroughly analyze
• Screen capturing using notes for the pros/cons and full journey; taking into consideration user reviews about products
• Analyze competitive content and performance

Important Factors (2)

• Features: Identify the pains and gains from the user experience
• Tone and Copy: Understand how competitors communicate, formal or informal language
• Customer Reviews: User feedback and comments on the product or app

Collect Data & Make Presentation

• Collecting competitor data and creating a summary matrix
• Suggesting modifications to the product design based on data analysis
• Present recommendations to the team and stakeholders.

Usability Testing

• Why Usability Testing is needed, different stages, user types, numbers of testers, facilitator.

Moderators/Facilitators

• Critical role in ensuring user comfort and minimizing defensiveness during usability testing.
• Implementing techniques like Echo, Boomrange & Columbo for answering user questions and getting clarifications

Leading Questions

• Avoiding leading questions: avoiding closed-ended (Yes/No) questions and rather using open-ended prompts instead.

Observation vs Interpretation

• Writing down observations, differentiating between observation and interpretation

Thinking Out Loud

• Conducting usability testing for participants to articulate their thought processes while using an interface.

Task Scenarios

• Creating task scenarios that motivating participants for a thorough analysis of the product

Prioritizing Usability Problems

• Grouping and organizing observations from participants
• Highlighting the most common problems through participant feedback
• Measuring the impact and severity of problems.

Severity of Problems

• Analysis of the impact and extent of effects of the problems using different scales like: Low, Medium or High severity

Switch to Room View Wasn't Noticed or Used

• A case study example of usability testing and design recommendations; highlighting important considerations

Mapping Methods

• Task flows, flowcharts, and wireflows for analyzing the process flow and steps, visual representation.

User Task Flows

• High-level representation of steps for achieving a specific goal for user interactions, usually linear rather than complex.

Making a Pancake/Coffee

• Flow charts for making a Pancake/Coffee, outlining the tasks, steps and activities involved in the process.

User Flows

• Detailing steps for tasks
• Includes decision points
• User flows tend to be more complex than task flows.

User Flows Elements

• Core elements: Decision, Start, Action, and Screen/Details, visual layout for representing user flows.

Additional Notes

• Wireflows: Combination of wireframes and flowcharts, showing user interactions within a product’s interface in more detail.

Research Plan Template.

• Templates for offline moderated research sessions, with sections for background, goals, key questions, recruitment, participant knowledge and timing

UX mapping techniques

• Techniques including task flows, flowcharts, and wireflows for creating diagrams for analyzing the process flow.

This quiz covers essential principles of user experience (UX) design, focusing on user journey mapping, design approaches, and common misconceptions in the field. Test your knowledge on the factors that influence the creation of effective user experiences and the significance of personas in design. Perfect for anyone seeking to understand the core concepts of UX design.