Chapter 1 - UX 101

• To be a UX Designer means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, and to design products and services for them.
• UX is the overall effect created by using the interactions and perceptions that someone has when using a product or service.
• Most UX teams of one act as generalists, blending some or all of the most commons roles together.

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Chapter 2 - Getting started

Typical UX process:

• Discovery: Figuring out where you stand and what you need to do.
• Stakeholder Interviews: Spending time with key decision makers to understand their expectations.
• SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats.
• Requirements Gathering: The process of working with business to determine what must go in the product and how it must be implemented.
• Strategy: Establishing a vision for the target user experience in order to design coherent and unified products.
• Design Principle: A handful of characteristics of how the product design should be experienced by user.
• Vision Artifacts: It gives a taste of how a person might experience a product. It might be in form of Diagrams, Schematics, Storyboards, Vision Movies.
• Roadmaps: An analysis of what need to be built first, next and last.
• User research: Learning about who your users are and what motivates them.
• Primary User Research: Various methods for learning from users firsthand.
• Secondary User Research: Publicly available research or research that's been conducted by other parts.
• Personas, Mental Models and User Stories: What you've learned about user through primary and secondary research.
• Design: Specifying how a user will encounter a product or service.
• Information Architecture / Sitemap: Documentation of how the system is organized.
• Process and Task Diagrams: How users will interact with the system step-by-step and how the system will adapt or respond.
• Wireframes: Schematic diagrams of each page or state in the system.
• Design Comps: A page exactly as it should look when implemented.
• Detailed Specifications: Documentation of how the system should function.
• Style and Pattern Guides: Documentation of standard conventions for repeatable patterns.
• Prototypes: Functioning os semi-functioning examples.
• Implementation: Ensuring that the design works for users.
• Usability Testing: How easily people can use the design to accomplish anticipated tasks.
• Implementation Oversight: Involvement between user experience designers and the engineering team.
• Metrics / Analytics Tracking: Monitoring how people are using the product or service to identify opportunities.

You don't really need permission to be a UX team of one. You can infuse the UX philosophy into work that you're currently doing.

• Find the parts of the product that everyone knows need improvement.
• If you want people to get to buy into the concept of UX, you've got to be offering them something of value.
• The negotiation should be how, instead of if.

Get to know your users - They are the core of user experience - Focus on getting started with user research.

• Good products eventually becomes somewhat invisible.
• Design products for and with users.
• Data are people too.
• A well-designed product enables a user to accomplish his goal efficiently and without confusion or disruption.
• Real UX teams of one are committed to knowing not just "users" in the abstract, but the people who really use their products.
• Figure out what you know and what you don't.
• Do guerrilla research.
• The challenge for UX professionals is to understand user needs well enough to look past the prosaic solutions to discover the elegant ones.
• Sketch your ideas - It takes a lot of work to make something simple.
• Enlist colleagues to generate design ideas.
• Learn from other successful products - "What makes a particular design work?" When something doesn't work try to pinpoint why.
• Design improvements often happen gradually, over time.

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Chapter 3 - Building support for your work

• Principles over process
• Principles can keep the work anchored.
• Principles can apply to not just what you make, but also how you make.
• Invite people in - The more you can facilitate a cross-functional team, the more you will empower others to feel ownership and involvement in the process.
• Make things together - How to accomplish that goal can become a battlefield of differing opinions.
• Foster a constructive evolution of shared vision
• Simply sketching out things is a great starting point. You can get even more creative and have a cross-functional team participate in collaborative design exercises, which are great for loosening people up and getting the ideas rolling.
• Truly listen - Once all the information and viewpoints are understood, is to create a design solution that cleverly reconciles those tensions and produces a satisfying experience for users.
• Letting the other guy do more of the talking and asking why whenever the opportunity arises.
• Know when it's good enough - The work is never really done.
• Committing yourself to the idea that it will be imperfect and that others will have good ideas fow how to improve it.
• Dealing with people issues - Relationships are the most important means by which you can establish a foundation for UX.
• Assume that everyone has good intentions and they try to see the situation from other people's perspectives rather than just their own.
• It's only by working with others that we build unofficial and official support for UX
• You must work with the resources that are available.
• Pull the UX enthusiasts out of the woodwork and promote broader UX uptake within the company.
• Invite them into your process and yourself into theirs so they get a better sense of what UX means and what value it provides.
• Hone your sketching skills so you can turn any meeting into a design session.
• Pre-meetings help you get people to commit their support for your approach prior to going in for the big reveal.
• Find plain-English way to describe what you're attempting to do and speak to the outcome not just the process.
• UX practioners, due to their focus on both user needs and business need, can provide a holistic view.
• Suggest in a friendly fashion that the user experience of the product often benefits down the road from having UX involved in early stage efforts.
• Help other see how UX impacts the process - Make it clear how UX changes the established process.
• Position yourself as someone who can share internal knowledge.
• See it as an opportunity to learn.
• Work with them rather than against them.
• Stay actively involved so you can own and direct how the work gets executed.
• Treat this as a teachable moment to expose others to what user-centered design really entails.
• Give the team an understanding of what needs to be improved.
• People love stories, case studies and stories give people a memorable narrative that they can envision themselves in.
• Shared experiences (even minor ones) turn co-workers into allies.

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