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.
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.
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.