Who pays the price if we ignore the edge cases?
Nowadays, companies focus on speed, growth and expand. With overloaded work and endless deadlines, designers and developers have no time to take care of the edge cases. Only be available to focus on a happy path, which causes the deprioritization of the edge cases.
Ignoring edge cases is subconsciously baked into our design process.
However, designing for the “happy path” best-case scenario leaves our most vulnerable users on the margins.
Superhuman is an example to explain how bad it could be if we don’t take edge cases seriously. Superhuman released a product in a really short time which is called “read receipt”. The function for this product is :
1. once sent by superhuman, no matter what email client the recipient is using, as long as they open the email, the sender will get the notification with the location of the recipient.
2. Recipient have no control to shut off the function
Yikes!!
Take canary in the coal mine as the metaphor, when canary is in danger in the coal mine, everyone should get out of the mine. That is to say if you design for the well-being of the most vulnerable, you design for the well-being of everyone. However, we don’t design like that today. Today we design for the least vulnerable and then pretend nothing bad ever happens in a coal mine.
“As companies push for scale and growth at breakneck pace they are weaponizing technology against groups that fall outside of their defined happy path.”
Hence, edge cases are real and they are hurting our users. Take edge cases into consideration, our design will be more resilient.
https://modus.medium.com/who-pays-the-price-of-happy-path-design-36047f00c044
The OneClass Live Tutorial Booking process is highly comprehensive due to the various edge cases involved. Throughout the design process, we held meetings with the Tutor management team to understand the workflow of the booking process. We considered scenarios such as student cancellations or changes to bookings, unavailability of tutors to join a class, instances where either the student or tutor (or both) miss a class, and the minimum and maximum time constraints, among others. Based on these discussions, we made numerous modifications to the workflow to accommodate all possible scenarios, resulting in a more intricate tree map.
Our approach involves launching the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first and conducting iterative improvements simultaneously with the development team working on the basic version. It is crucial to address edge cases in order to ensure a seamless user experience for both tutors and students.
Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users
“The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.”
Minimize choices.
Break complex tasks into smaller steps to decrease cognitive load.
Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options.
Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users.
Google Hompepage
Google’s landing page is a good example demonstrating Hick’s law. The entitle page keeps focus on only the act of searching, by removing any friction that could lead to additional decision-making. When you begin typing, the predicted keywords appear, eliminating the need to spell out the entire word.
Google’s goal is to initiate search based on a search query as quickly as possible and remove any distraction to the users.
Move on to the visual aspects of the search results page, which is optimized for scannability. The hierarchy of information in each result is clear, consistent and also scannable. The concept of chunking is behind it. Breaking down an information set into small pieces, which helps to guide how ux design group and organize content. When we chunk content in design, we are effectively making it easier to comprehend.
The OneClass new subscription payment section. Instead of present all the payment steps on the first landing. Just show the only option user need to make on the first step, which is choose the package first. Once they decide to switch between plan, they can use the switch btn to make the changes instead of go back and leave the payment page. To hold the user stick on the payment page is the goal for this new payment design. Jump back and forth will easily increase user’s cognitive load, to make them think more and wait longer during page loading.
And for the coupon, instead of display the coupon text field, user can choose to open it by themselves if they do have a coupon. Eliminate the area that might distract user’s attention when making the payment can increase the success of the final payment.
Shrink the previous 4 step-payment process to be 2 steps, dramatically increased the company’s revenue, which meets the business goal.
Reducing Cognitive Load
Hick’s law’s principle is to make the choices easier for our user, which is to reduce user’s cognitive load.
What causes cognitive load?
Too many choices
Too many thought required
Lack of clarity
How to reduce cognitive load?
1. Avoid Unnecessary Elements:
Less is more. But remember: don’t overvalue simplicity at the cost of clarity.
2. Leverage Common Design Patterns:
Using the elements user already know from the other sites or products, which could save their learning time and enable them to move right along and get closer to achieve their goal. (Jakob’s Law)
3. Eliminate Unnecessary Tasks:
Make it easier for users to stay focused on their goal, eliminate any elements that are unnecessary.
4. Minimize Choices:
When a user is confronted with too many choices, cognitive load will increase due to decision paralysis. During the design process, we need to minimize the choices that users must make at any given circumstance, such as navigation, forms and drop-downs.
5. Chunk content:
When chunk content, it improves the scannability. The hierarchy of information in each result is clear, consistent and also scannable. Breaking down an information set into small pieces, which helps to guide how ux design groups and organizes content. When we chunk content in design, we are effectively making it easier to comprehend.
6. Use Iconography with Caution:
Be careful when using icons. Universally understood icons work well to reduce cognitive load like print, close, play/pause, tweet, share on Facebook, users already learn it and get used to it in their previous experience. When leveraging the power of iconography, it is best to accompany them with text labels to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity.
“The less they have to think about what they need to do to achieve their goal, the more likely it is they will achieve it.”
Fitt’s Law
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”
Touch targets should be large enough for users to accurately select them.
Touch targets should have ample spacing between them.
Touch targets should be placed in areas of an interface that allow them to be easily acquired.
Fitts’ law is widely applied in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. For example, this law influenced the convention of making interactive buttons large (especially on finger-operated mobile devices)—smaller buttons are more difficult and time-consuming to click. Likewise, the distance between a user’s attention area and the task-related button should be kept as short as possible.
The new Homework Help ask question section in OneClass is designed in a way that, when a user clicks on the section, it opens a full-screen-sized input field as a pop-up. This approach aims to address the issue of user distraction by eliminating the surrounding information on the landing page. By providing a distraction-free environment, users can focus solely on filling out their question. This design choice minimizes unnecessary choices and maximizes the user's valuable action.
Jakob’s Law
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
Users will transfer expectations they have built around one familiar product to another that appears similar.
By leveraging existing mental models, we can create superior user experiences in which the users can focus on their tasks rather than on learning new models.
When making changes, minimize discord by empowering users to continue using a familiar version for a limited time.
As designers, we must close the gap that exists between our mental models and that of our users. It’s important we do this because there will be problems when they aren’t aligned, which can affect how users perceive the products and experiences we’ve helped build. This misalignment is called mental model discordance, and it occurs when a familiar product is suddenly changed.
Take for example Snapchat, which rolled out a major redesign in early 2018. They launched a reformatted layout, which in turn confused users by making it difficult to access features they used on a daily basis. These unhappy users immediately took to Twitter and expressed their disapproval en masse. Even worse was the subsequent migration of users to Snapchat’s competitor, Instagram. Snapchat had failed to ensure the mental model of their users would be aligned with the redesigned version of their app, and the resulting discordance caused major backlash.
YouTube Redesign
But major redesigns don’t always have to result in backlash. When YouTube launched a new version in 2017 after years of essentially the same design, they allowed desktop users to ease into the new Material Design UI without having to commit. Users could preview the new design, gain some familiarity, submit feedback, and even revert to the old version if they preferred it. As a result, the inevitable mental model discordance was avoided by simply empowering users to switch when they were ready.
The redesign of posting and answering questions platform, which is actually pretty similar as a forum, like reddit, zhihu. Instead of creating a completely new layout or function for the forum, we carefully examined existing forums and learned from them. We considered factors such as layout, functions, advantages, and disadvantages of each forum, as well as conducted interviews with our current users. This deep understanding of our users' existing mental model when using a forum served as the foundation for the redesign of OneClass Q&A platform.
By incorporating familiar elements and features from existing forums, users can easily transition into the new design and apply their existing understanding of how a forum operates. This approach helps to ensure a smoother user experience and minimizes any potential conflicts or confusion caused by a discordance of mental models.
Doherty Threshold
Provide system feedback within 400 ms in order to keep users’ attention and increase productivity.
Use perceived performance to improve response time and reduce the perception of waiting.
Animation is one way to visually engage people while loading or processing is happening in the background.
Progress bars help make wait times tolerable, regardless of their accuracy.
Purposefully adding a delay to a process can actually increase its perceived value and instill a sense of trust, even when the process itself actually takes much less time.
Dual -track agile
Takeaway:
Dual-track agile involves two tracks — discovery and delivery — that work in parallel.
Product discovery allows you to validate ideas before you commit to building them.
Dual-track agile enables development teams to be confident that they’re building the right things.
Above all, dual-track agile means you can quickly and efficiently make the best product improvements.
The two tracks of dual-track agile
As we’re sure you know by now, dual-track agile involves two tracks: discovery and delivery. Let’s take a look at how each one works.
The discovery track
Here at productboard, we spend a lot of time making sure we understand exactly what we should be building for our users. Our team uses a Double Diamond approach for conducting product discovery, structured as follows:
dual-track agile — product discovery track
Identify the challenge
Understand
Define
Re-frame the problem
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Solution
By using this framework and following its steps, our team has built an environment of continuous learning that benefits both our teams and users, increased transparency into our entire product management process, and involved a diverse set of stakeholders. We hope you find as much value in it as we have.
The delivery track
The delivery track is what most people know as agile development. This track takes the learnings that the discovery track uncovered and applies them to the finished product. The aim of the delivery track is to build and release as many useful features and improvements as possible in a sprint.
Thanks to dual-track agile, this becomes far easier. The ideas are already validated, so the delivery team can simply focus their efforts on how best to implement the ideas. They can be confident that the features they’re working on are important to the users they’re building them for. In a lot of cases, they even have a detailed prototype to base their development on.
Ultimately, this makes building a product far easier and less resource-intensive.
Design patterns in ux design
Design patterns in UX design refer to reusable solutions to common user experience design problems. They provide proven and effective approaches to address specific design challenges and enhance the usability and user satisfaction of digital products or services.
While design patterns are more commonly associated with software development, there are several design patterns that are applicable to UX design. These patterns focus on user interaction, information architecture, visual design, and overall user experience. Here are a few examples:
Navigation Patterns: These patterns define how users navigate through a digital product or website. Examples include the Hamburger Menu, Tabbed Navigation, Breadcrumbs, and Mega Menus.
Form Design Patterns: These patterns provide guidance on designing forms and input fields to optimize user input and minimize errors. Examples include Inline Validation, Progressive Disclosure, and Autocomplete.
Onboarding Patterns: These patterns help users get familiar with a new product or service. Examples include Welcome Screens, Guided Tours, and Feature Callouts.
Card-Based Design: This pattern involves organizing information or content into visually appealing and digestible cards. It provides a modular and flexible way to present information and facilitate user interactions.
Feedback and Notification Patterns: These patterns focus on providing feedback to users and keeping them informed about system status or important updates. Examples include Toast Notifications, Error Messages, and Loading Spinners.
Visual Hierarchy Patterns: These patterns help designers structure and prioritize information on a screen to guide users' attention and understanding. Examples include Grid Layouts, Card Stacking, and Typography Hierarchy.
It's important to note that design patterns are not one-size-fits-all solutions. Designers should consider the specific context, user needs, and project requirements when applying design patterns. They should also iterate and customize the patterns to fit the unique goals and constraints of their design projects.
By utilizing design patterns, UX designers can leverage tested and effective design solutions, reduce design time, improve user experience consistency, and enhance usability across different digital products and services.
Characteristics of a good user experience
Usable
If a product is usable, it means the design, structure, and purpose of the product is clear and easy to use.
Is everything in the design easy to find?
Is the design’s functionality easy to understand?
Can users accomplish specific tasks within the design?
Example:
Imagine you are evaluating the usability of an airline app. Assuming the primary purpose of this app is to book a flight, the design should provide a clear and easy way to complete that task. For example, a section where you can easily enter travel and flight details on the homepage would be an example of good usability.
Equitable
If a product is equitable, it means a design is helpful to people with diverse abilities and backgrounds.
Are the needs of a diverse group of users considered?
Does the product’s design address the needs of traditionally underrepresented and excluded groups?
Example:
Imagine you are evaluating how equitable a social messaging app is. You might consider the design more equitable if the keyboard emoji list includes different skin tones and gender-neutral avatar options.
Enjoyable
If a product is enjoyable, it means the design delights the user. The design reflects what the user may be thinking or feeling and creates a positive connection with them.
Are there aspects of the design that consider the user’s feelings?
Does the design inspire delight in the user?
Does the design keep the user engaged throughout their experience?
Example:
Imagine you are evaluating how enjoyable a video streaming app is. Design aspects that might increase how much you enjoy the product include personalized recommendations based on previous watching habits, or the ability to customize the appearance of your account.
Useful
If a product is useful, that means it solves user problems. In other words, the design intentionally solves a user problem that the designer has identified.
Does the design add value to the user’s experience?
Does the design solve a problem for the user?
Does the design help the user achieve a specific goal?
Example:
magine you’re evaluating how useful a banking app is. Users typically download these apps because they need a place to manage their money. With this in mind, aspects of the app that might be considered useful are features that can be used to transfer money between accounts and pay bills.
Herbert Simon:
Design is nothing more than moving from an undesirable situation to a desirable situation.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking puts people first
Design thinking provides repeatable process that leads to successful solutions (the process is the same, content is the only thing that differs)
How does design thinking works?
Design thinking help you to get to the heart, get to the root of that potential problem. (the cause of the problem normally is hard to see since it is underneath the problem like the root of a tree)
Design think provide the ability to question: do i have everything I need to solve this problem.
5 whys is a good approach, keep asking why until you get the real cause. which can help designers to apply the effective solution to the real problem.
Design thinking is a powerful way to reframe and get to the root of the real problem.
Tip:
1. Asking questions is a great start to using the design thinking approach. We need to keep the person at the center of the conversation.
Reveal any biases/mental models that could get in the way of a solution. When you keep the human front and in center of the problem-solving journey, you will come to elegant solutions that makes them raving fans.
2. Design thinking is a repeatable process.
3. Design thinking is about asking questions to get to the root causes.
Traditional problem solving vs design thinking
decision making: inclusive and informed by cross-functional team
collaboration: co-creation and trust between teams, no siloes
brainstorming: wild& fun ideas can flourish
designing: treated as a cross-functional process instead of a job title
outcomes: replace perfect for mvp(learn fast)
Tim Brown，TED talk: design thinking
What is design?
Balancing the desirability (what human needs) with technical feasibility and economic viability.
Design is human centered. (starts with human) It may integrate with technology and economics, but it starts with what human needs
Ford Model T, Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Design research is not the same as asking customers what they want
Early-stage research in particular focuses on the problem/opportunity space, not the solution space. We talk to customers about their daily life, in order to understand the context they live and work in. We might ask about the time they used a particular product or service and delve into that experience. If we can, we observe people interacting with products and services in their own environment.
Once we’re done asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’, we analyse and synthesise all the data to find patterns and generate insights. In short, we don’t ask people what they want; we try to identify what they need.
Knowing what people want is useful - if you know what to focus on
If people tell you they want faster horses, they are telling you something useful. Namely, that they have a desire to go faster. It is the desired outcome (‘going faster’) that you should focus on, not the perceived solution (‘horses’).
Understanding how, why, when and in what context people want something, will help you uncover the underlying needs or problems. By decoupling these from the existing solution and (re)framing them, you can explore innovative ways of meeting needs and solving problems.
Ford gave people faster horses
Say that from a jobs-to-be-done perspective, the people’s ‘job’ was to get from A to B as fast as possible. Then what they were asking for when they asked for faster horses, was faster transportation. This is what Ford gave them. Cars are carriages with faster horses built inside them :-)
Design thinking + Jobs-to-be-done
JTBD: understand what users are trying to accomplish (outcomes)
Design thinking: provide solutions to solve the problem in the right way (but we don’t know if the solution is right or not, we need to do the research and survey to verify it)
Combine them can help us to apply a right solution to the problem in the right way
Designers can observe how customers use a product to refine it and improve the consumer’s experience — rather than completing endless rounds of ambiguous research or rumination.
User research:
user interviews, empathy map, persona, User story, user journey maps
Jobs-to-be-done framework, affinity diagram
Affinity diagram:
Help team to present all the thoughts, problems in a visualize way. Then organize and categorize them.
Design thinking:
Keep asking why to find the root cause of the problems that listed.
Jobs-to-be-done framework:
Figure out what user want? By asking what they want to do by using this product. What are their desired outcomes.
Apply right design solutions to the root cause of the problem in a right way:
confident the design solution are on the right track
gained buy-ins from stakeholders
supported by the entire team
everyone are on the same page
user and user’s true needs are always in the forefront and in the center of the whole design process(user-centric approach)
Persona + Jobs-to-be-done
Persona: high empathy, low actionability
JTBD: low empathy, high actionability
Personas used together with the JTBD can maximize the effect of using qualitative data about your users. First, you create personas and then use JTBD to understand the actions. Personas will help you distinguish your users by demographics and the goals they want to achieve. And JTBD will help you think about users from a perspective of their true needs, so you can define the utility your product should have to help the user to complete specific tasks.
Ideation
Crazy 8
8 ideas in 8 minutes.
User flow diagram
Be used for a new service/product or improve the current workflow of an existing task like checkout or signup process.
Storytelling (A story captures attention, provides clarity, and inspires teams and stakeholders to take action. There are many ways to visually communicate stories to our teams and stakeholders)
UX stories, storyboards(ideation stage), journey maps(research stage), and empathy maps(qualitative research: say, think, do, feel)
“A problem well stated is half solved.”
Usability test VS User test
Usability test:
Usability testing is all about getting real people to interact with a website, app, or other product you've built and observing their behavior and reactions to it. Whether you start small by watching session recordings or go all out and rent a lab with eye-tracking equipment, usability testing is a necessary step to make sure you build an effective, efficient, and enjoyable experience for your users.
Benefits of website usability testing
Your website can benefit from usability testing no matter where it is in the development process, from prototyping all the way to the finished product. You can also continue to test the user experience as you iterate and improve your product over time.
Validate your prototype. Bring in users in the early stages of the development process, and test whether they’re experiencing any issues before locking down a final product. Do they encounter any bugs? Does your site or product behave as expected when users interact with it? Testing on a prototype first can validate your concept and help you make plans for future functionality before you spend a lot of money to build out a complete website.
Confirm your product meets expectations. Once your product is completed, test usability again to make sure everything works the way it was intended. How's the ease of use? Is something still missing in the interface?
Identify issues with complex flows. If there are functions on your site that need users to follow multiple steps (for example an ecommerce checkout process), run usability testing to make sure these processes are as straightforward and intuitive as possible.
Complement and illuminate other data points. Usability testing can often provide the why behind data points accumulated from other methods: your funnel analysis might show you that visitors drop off your site, and conducting usability testing can highlight underlying issues with pages with high churn rate.
Catch minor errors. In addition to large-scale usability issues, usability testing can help identify smaller errors. A new set of eyes is more likely to pick up on broken links, site errors, and grammatical issues that have been inadvertently glossed over. Usability testing can also validate fixes made after identifying those errors.
Develop empathy. It's not unusual for the people working on a project to develop tunnel vision around their product and forget they have access to knowledge that their typical website visitor may not have. Usability testing is a good way to develop some empathy for the real people who are using and will be using your site, and look at things from their perspective.
Get buy-in for change. It's one thing to know about a website issue; it's another to see users actually struggle with it. When it's evident that something is being misunderstood by users, it's natural to want to make it right. Watching short clips of key usability testing findings can be a very persuasive way to lobby for change within your organization.
Ultimately provide a better user experience. Great customer experience is essential for a successful product. Usability testing can help you identify issues that wouldn't be uncovered otherwise and create the most user-friendly product possible.
Hotjar helps us empathize with our users. It reminds us that there are real human beings on the other end. It also confirms that our work as a product development team has an impact, and is making our customer's lives easier.
1. Hotjar Engage
Hotjar (that’s us, hello! 👋) recently joined forces with PingPong, a user testing and interview tool. Now called Engage, it allows you to automate the process of scheduling, analyzing, and sharing usability tests and interviews.
Designed to support remote moderated and unmoderated usability tests, Hotjar Engage makes it easy to recruit participants from our panel of more than 175,000 volunteers. Better yet, you can opt to bring in your own testers and use our platform to run your interviews.
When the tests are over, Engage generates accurate video transcripts and lets you create and share time-stamped notes. Engage also integrates Hotjar’s other user behavior tools, like Recordings and Heatmaps, to help you analyze participants’ website journeys in detail.
Key features: participant recruitment, time-stamped notes, interview transcripts
Notable for: syncing with Hotjar Recordings and Heatmaps to give you deeper insights into what participants do and why
2. Hotjar Recordings
Part of the Hotjar platform, our Recordings tool lets you rewatch the journeys of users who visited your website.
Designed to help online businesses and product teams gather data about user behavior, session recordings are helpful for both usability testing and conversion optimization.
Hotjar recordings are the ideal solution when you want to record large numbers of journeys to identify trends. You can filter recordings by signs of frustration like rage clicks and u-turns—or leverage User Attributes to segment your data even further.
Key features: rage click and u-turn filters, time-stamped notes, advanced segmenting with the User Attributes filter
Notable for: gathering data from every single visitor, so you can filter by audience segments and user behaviors to find the most insightful journeys
Metrics & Indicators
To measure if your design solution works or not
Metrics are quantitative measures that can be expressed in numbers, such as conversion rates, retention rates, satisfaction scores, or error rates. (usability test)
Indicators are qualitative measures that can be expressed in words, such as feedback, testimonials, reviews, or stories. (user interviews)
Universal design, Inclusive design, Equity-focused design
Universal design:
Universal design is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the widest range of situations. Think of it like a one-size-fits-all approach. Designers propose one solution for everyone. The problem is that when you focus on creating one solution for everyone, the designs lose their effectiveness. It's often difficult to achieve any goals with your product when you have so many intended users.
Inclusive design:
inclusive design can be described as solve for one, extend to many. With inclusive design, you solve for one type of user, and the benefit of that solution can extend to many other types of users. Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design. We'll explore accessibility in more detail later. But keep in mind that the idea of "solve for one, extend to many," only benefits the group the design was created for and existing users. Many groups are still left out.
Equity-focused design:
build products that meet the needs of specific individuals in groups who have been excluded in the past.
The key point is that these are all different approaches to solving issues of underrepresentation and designing for a more equitable future.
“The strange thing about UX design is that you won’t really notice it if it’s good design. You only notice it when it’s bad. ”
How to avoid the most edge cases?
create personas and user stories. If UX designers make sure their personas and user stories account for a wide variety of users and problems, they can keep even the most vulnerable users on the happy path.
thoroughly review the project before launch.
Wireframes help visualize the project, which makes it easier to identify potential user pain points and fix them before launch for folks who are not visually impaired.
Anticipate user needs. A good ux designer is like being a friend that always support the users when they meet obstacles during their experience with the product, reroute and provide them with other solutions that guide them back to the happy path.
Often what you think is going to happen when your app is in the hands of a user, is actually not what happens.
If you can't put yourself in the user's shoes, you can't be sure your design will really help them.
User journey map benefits:
A user journey map helps UX designers create obstacle free paths for users
reduces the impact of designer bias, which you might remember as the tendency for the designer to design according to their own needs and wants instead of a user's. Creating a user journey map lets you thoroughly document the entire sequence of events and interactions a user experiences, including the user's interaction with your design. That way you can really focus on how a specific persona, not you, thinks and feels at every step of the journey.
highlights new pain points
Identify improvement opportunities
The best way to learn about how to improve your designs is to conduct research and get feedback from people with disabilities directly.
The curb-cut effect is a phenomenon that describes how products and policies designed for people with disabilities often end up helping everyone.
Problem Statement
Problem statements provide clarity about your users’ goals and help UX designers identify constraints that prevent users from meeting those goals. Problem statements also help your team measure success.
The most common framework used to create problem statements is the 5 Ws and H framework. After you define the user’s pain points, you can answer who, what, when, where, why, and how to solve the user’s problem.
Who is experiencing the problem? Knowing your users and their background is key to creating successful solutions for them.
What are the pain points you’re trying to solve? Determining a user’s pain points early allows you to answer the rest of these questions and clarify the context of the pain points.
Where is the user when they’re using the product? A user’s physical context matters to your design.
When does the problem occur? Maybe it’s right after the end of a long and tedious process, or maybe it’s something that happens daily. Knowing when the problem occurs can help you better empathize with the user’s feelings.
Why is the problem important? Knowing how this problem affects your user’s experience and life will help to clarify the potential consequences.
How are users reaching their goals by using the product? Understanding how users reach their goals allows you to map the user journey that they take through your product.
Simplistically, user need statements encourage us to see users’ needs as verbs (that is, goals and end states) instead of nouns that describe solutions. For example, users don’t ever need a dropdown (noun); they need to see the choices that they can make and select one of them (verb). They don’t need a dashboard (noun) — they need to digest varied information in one place (verb). The nouns are possible solutions to users’ needs, but they are not the only solutions. If we focus on these nouns, we run the risk of ending up with suboptimal designs. The entire purpose of ideation is to explore ideas, so don’t lock yourself down prematurely by selecting the solution too early.
Problem statements are an essential first step in the design phase of the design process. Strong problem and hypothesis statements help a design team align on which user problem to focus on, and they give everyone a clear goal. To be competitive for UX design positions, designers must be able to show that they can distill user information into succinct and compelling problems and hypotheses that drive narrowly focused and practical design work.
Value Proposition
What does your product do?
Why should user care?
Have you ever encountered a product or app and thought, “I have to have this!”? That’s not a coincidence! This is the dream for UX designers because we want to create products that provide a clear value for users.
Step 1. Describe your product’s features and benefits.
Step 2. Explain the value of the product.
Step 3. Connect these features and benefits with the needs of your users.
Step 4. Review your official value proposition list.
One of the most important things to know about value propositions is that they need to be short, clear, and to the point. Users want to be able to easily identify exactly how your product will meet their unique needs and what sets your product apart in the market. Sometimes users won’t know what they need until you explain it to them. That’s the real heart of product design innovation.
Psychology in UX design
Mental models are internal maps that allow humans to predict how something will work.
Feedback loops refer to the outcome a user gets at the end of a process.
In spite of all the limitations the human factors puts on UX designers, it also gives us opportunities to create even better user experiences.
The human factor describes the range of variables humans bring to their product interactions.
Here's a few of the most common ones: impatience, limited memory, needing analogies, limited concentration, changes in need, needing motivation, prejudices, fears, making errors, and misjudgment.
Sometimes a well-known brand will revert their product packaging back to the original design in order to connect to a user sense of nostalgia.
psychological phenomena:
Von Restorff effect or isolation effect, states that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered. (CTA btn)
Serial position effect, says that when people are given a list of items, they are more likely to remember the first few and the last few, the items in the middle tend to blur. (App navigation bar)
Hick’s law: states that the more options a user has, the longer it takes for them to make a decision. As a UXer, you might think that giving your user a lot of choices enhances their experience. But Hick's law tells us we may be making their decisions harder.
It's important for UX designers to use these different psychological principles in an ethical way. You don't want to exploit the user. You only want to encourage them. You don't want to overpower the user. You want to empower them.
Hooked: habit-forming product
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/designing-habit-forming-products-75ab8572c3ea
Ideation:
A designer, either individually or in a group, brainstorms out loud. Every idea is documented, often on sticky notes or a white board. The goal is quantity of ideas over quality, so share as many ideas as possible. No evaluation is allowed at this stage. If you're brainstorming in a group, make sure you gather a diverse team for different backgrounds and perspectives. Question the obvious. It can be difficult to question a common belief or practice if everyone has the same opinions. Finally, after you come up with a bunch of ideas, take a break. Then everyone should come back together to evaluate the ideas.
Evaluate your ideas:
Feasible: technically possible to build
Desirable: Best at solving the user problem
Viable: Financially beneficial for the business
IDEO: design thinking
design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A human-centered designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.
Each of these individuals knew that to design well requires attention to context and consequences. An elegant and effective solution doesn't exist in isolation, but in connection with the systems that support it, and that it in turn supports. It's this outlook that informs our deep research process and necessitates prioritizing human needs and listening to human voices on the way to design innovation.
Approach of ideation stage:
1. Competitive Audit:
A competitive audit is an overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Direct competitive audit: same target user, solve same problems
Indirect competitive audit: different/same target user. solve different/same problems
Reason:
First, they help inform your design process. How did your competitors approach designing their products? Knowing what others have done can help you make better design decisions for your own product.
Second, competitive audits help you solve usability problems. Is your competitor's website difficult to use? If so, you know what to avoid for your own website.
Third, competitive audits can reveal gaps in the market. Are there user needs your competitors do not meet? Your product might be able to address these user needs.
Fourth, competitive audits provide reliable evidence. Why is it important to gather evidence? Design ideas are most successful when there's a deep understanding of business needs and market gaps. Competitive audits are a huge part of gathering that information.
Knowing all of these things can help you save time, money, and energy.
2. How might we:
“How might we” (HMW) is a design thinking activity used to translate problems into opportunities for design. HMW gets your creativity flowing and encourages you to think about the problem from different perspectives.
3. Crazy eight
Deceptive patterns are UX methods that trick users into doing or buying something they wouldn't otherwise have done or bought. These can include a range of visual, interactive, audio, or motion elements added to e-commerce sites, ads, and other marketing content.
Conduct UX research and test early concept
A UX designer may conduct various testing types, including:
User acceptance testing (UAT)
UAT determines if the product does what it was designed to do.
Quality assurance testing (QA)
QA testing examines the product for any unwanted errors and tests if everything works as intended. If, during QA testing, the UX design team discovers something that doesn’t work as intended, such as a button that does not redirect to the correct page, they may submit a bug report to the development team so the issue can be fixed.
Accessibility evaluation
Accessibility evaluation ensures that all aspects of the product adhere to the accessibility standards. This evaluation may be part of the QA testing.