APPLICATION DESIGN / ASSESSMENT 2
╎Gwendalyn Firly Bong / 0374580
╎Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
╎Application Design
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Instructions
II. Lectures
III. Project 2
IV. Feedback
V. Reflection
I. INSTRUCTIONS
II. LECTURES
Week 4: Card Sorting Method
What is Card Sorting
- A method to understand how users group and categorize information
- Helps to determine an organization scheme that aligns with users' mental models
- Informs the design of navigation menus, website or app architecture, and content strategy
Types of Card Sorting
- Open Card Sorting
- Closed Card Sorting
- Hybrid Card Sorting
Benefits of Card Sorting
- Informs Information Architecture
- Usability Enhancement
- User-centered Design
- Iterative Improvement
- Enhancing Findability
- Design Decision Validation
- Adapting to User Diversity
- Content Prioritization
- Stakeholder Collaboration
- Navigation Optimization
Pros and Cons
Week 5: Introduction to User Research
UX Research
- The process of understanding user behaviors, needs, and attitudes through various observation and feedback collection methods
- Effective UX research entails employing the appropriate methods at the right stages of product development
Integrating UX Research
- The process of understanding user behaviors, needs, and attitudes through various observation and feedback collection methods
5 Steps of UX Research
- Objectives
- What areas of knowledge require further exploration and understanding?
- Hypotheses
- What assumptions do we hold about our users?
- Methods
- Considering constraints such as time and manpower, which approaches should we choose?
- Conduct
- Implement the chosen methods to collect data
- Synthesize
- Address the knowledge gaps, validate or refute our assumptions about users, and identify design opportunities
UX Research Methods
- Qualitative
- Investigates user behaviors and motivations
- Interviews/observation, user groups, moderated card sort, usability testing
- Quantitative
- Uses numberical data from surveys and analytics to inform evidence-based design deciisons and optimize user experiences
- Online surveys, unmoderated card sort, web/app analytics, eyetracking testing
Week 6: Interviews and Questions
Interview
- Explore user attitudes, beliefs, and experiences related to a product.
- Can be conducted faceto-face, over the phone, or via video streaming.
- You can observe both what the user says (verbal cues) and their body language or facial expressions (nonverbal cues). These observations help you understand if the user feels positive (enthusiasm) or negative (discomfort) about the product or service.
- Pros
- Users provide detailed insights into their attitudes, desires, and experiences
- Allows addressing and clarifying individual concerns and misunderstandings immediately
- Cons
- Time consuming
- Requires preparation, conducting, analysis, and sometimes transcription
- Limits sample size, which can be problematic
- Data quality depends on the interviewer's skill
Online Surveys
- Research tools comprising questions aimed at gauging user preferences, attitudes, and opinions on a given topic
- They are commonly conducted online, available in various lengths and formats, with data collected automatically and often analyzed by the survey tool
- They help uncover user demographics, goals, and information needs
- Users might describe their behaviours or preferences differently from how they act in real situations, affecting the validity of the research findings
- Pros
- Conducted online, allows for rapid and inexpensive data collection
- Anonymity often leads to more candid/honest responses
- Cons
- Ensuring a representative sample is challenging, particularly from social media or general forums.
- Poorly crafted or leading questions can bias responses
- Lengthy surveys may discourage participation
Usability Testing
- Evaluating a product or service with representative users
- Participants are tasked with completing specific actions while observers record notes
- The primary aim is to detect usability issues, gather qualitative data, and assess overall user satisfaction
- It doesn't yield large feedback samples like questionnaires
Week 7: Personas and User Journey Map
User Persona
- Persona is a rich description of a user
- Crafting a clear problem statement is vital for effectively addressing real user issues
- Understanding the needs and requirements of the user is essential in this process
- Personas aid in strategizing and guiding intelligent design decisions
- It's not one person, but represents a whole range of users
How do user personas influence product decisions?
- Increased adoption
- Crafting personas from multiple research initiatives provides a comprehensive view of user preferences and pain points
- Enables the design of products that align with user preferences and solve their problems
- Increased user retention
- Understanding and documenting user pain points helps keep users engaged.
- Addressing these pain points through product improvements can reduce user churn
- Better prioritization
- Create a matrix with personas in columns and features in rows to score how each feature affects each persona.
- Use criteria-controlled scoring to prioritize features effectively
Qualities of an Effective User Persona
- Uses real data
- Utilize real and current data when constructing user personas, using both quantitative insights from surveys and qualitative insights from interviews and customer stories
- Allocate sufficient time and resources to establish a robust user persona research process
- Focuses on the present
- Every detail included in the personas should be backed by data collected or observed
- Avoid creating personas based on stereotypes or assumptions, as these can lead to inaccurate representations
- Context specific
- Focus on including information pertinent to your product and project in your buyer persona
- Avoid including information just for the sake of it; prioritize relevance and specificity
- Avoids biases
- Include only information directly linked to behavior or thinking in buyer personas. Focus on understanding audience reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles rather than superficial demographics
- Opt for images and names that don't reinforce stereotypes or preconceptions, ensuring a more unbiased design process
What to include in user persona
- Demographic information
- Age, gender, occupation, education, income and location
- Personality traits
- Goals and objectives
- Behavioral Information
- User preferences, behavior, habits and goals
- How do they interact with the product or service?
- Needs and pain poins
- Scenarios and use cases
- User quotes
User Journey Map
- Provides a visual representation of the steps an individual takes to achieve a goal
- Encourages designers and developers to consider the user's experience in a more organized and comprehensive manner
- Fosters empathy by allowing the team to relive the user's journey in a narrative form, helping them grasp the user's emotions and frustrations
- Identifies the pain points encountered by users when interacting with the product
Examples of User Journey Maps
Week 8: User Flow, Card Sorting 2 & Sitemap
Site Map
- A footprint showing how each page relate to the web/app’s hierarchy. It guides the user's attention and organizes content meaningfully
- Visual representation of site / app content organization
- Hierarchy of nodes (boxes) representing pages or content
- Arrows or lines indicate relationships between web pages/ app interface
- With card sorting insights, you can create a logical and intuitive organization for your content in site map
User Flow
- The user’s path to finish a specific purpose
- It includes each step, from the starting point to the endpoint
- Visualization tool
- User flows are visual representations of all interactions a user has on your site/App
- Purpose
- To design efficient task completion
- Focuses on tasks
- User flows concentrate on the specific actions users take within a product to accomplish something
- Multiple paths
- There can be multiple branches in a user flow, depending on the choices a user makes at different points
- Benefits
- User flows help designers understand how users interact with a product, identify potential issues, and optimize the user experience for better usability and efficiency
III. PROJECT 2
Application Design Task 2 by gwennie
IV. FEEDBACK
Week 5
Introduction to Task 2
Week 6
Preparation of survey and interview questions + card sorting
Week 7
Finalize survey and interview questions, and proceed with user journey and personas
Week 8
Fix up the user journey map, and start user flow, don't mention users going to specific pages within the app
Week 9Finalize task 2, begin sketching out wireframes
Week 5
Introduction to Task 2
Week 6
Preparation of survey and interview questions + card sorting
Week 7
Finalize survey and interview questions, and proceed with user journey and personas
Week 8
Fix up the user journey map, and start user flow, don't mention users going to specific pages within the app
Week 9
Finalize task 2, begin sketching out wireframes
V. REFLECTION
There were a lot of things to do for this task, so I tried my best to make progress every week. Because of this, I was able to finish up this task without cramming everything into one day, which helped with the thinking and flow. However, I had some difficulty creating some aspects of this task, especially the user journey map and the user flow. Thanks to the lecturer's feedback, i was able to complete it in the end.
There were a lot of things to do for this task, so I tried my best to make progress every week. Because of this, I was able to finish up this task without cramming everything into one day, which helped with the thinking and flow. However, I had some difficulty creating some aspects of this task, especially the user journey map and the user flow. Thanks to the lecturer's feedback, i was able to complete it in the end.
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