This post is a reflection of the things I learnt during an online digital concepting course in autumn 2019. During the course each student familiarized and improved a digital service concept according to predefined business objectives. I chose to study a beauty service booking system. At the end of this post you can find few tasks which I completed for the course.
Looking back at my notebook, I learnt that user experience (UX) is about how easy it is to complete a task. It is an user centered process design that covers all touch points related to the task. Basically, UX covers all things that can be designed to make users experience better, but still not to be confused with user interface designing that focuses on looks and style. The iterative research process of UX is repeated for the purpose of exploring, fixing or refining a design. There are several UX process life cycle designs, each with its strengths and momentous: Waterfall, Spiral model, star life cycle of usability engineering and Mayhew’s usability engineering life cycle.
UX has a long history which was initiated by Feng Shui (easiness and harmony) later developing from historical Greece of agronomic disciplines to Frederick Winslow's systematic management and to Toyota’s human centered usability. Later influenced by Henry Dreifuss who designed for peoples safety, happiness and contact points. Not to mention one of the most recent UX maestros Walt Disney, the communicator of color, shape, texture and form.
USEFUL – USABLE – VALUABLE – ACCESSIBLE – FINDABLE – CREDIBLE – DESIRABLE
Good UX is pleasurable, efficient and fun! It is based on customer discovery, lean development and on information patterns. In digital UX data from user teams is vital for coming up with efficient UX solutions.
Customer discovery, understand:
WHY? Motivations, values, views
WHAT? Functionality, features
HOW? Accessibility, aesthetics, are there physical limitations
Good UX design base is segmented customer approach with customer personas that are relevant to product segment. When measuring ROI of UX, it’s not only about the number of digital clicks, but how hard those are.
During the course I found it interesting to learn about prototype types which describes briefly as:
Horizontal (I): Broad in feature, but less depth in its coverage of functionality.
Vertical (-): Depth in functionality, but only narrow breadth of features.
T: Shallow with few points in depth. God for system evaluation.
Local: represents a small area where horizontal and vertical slides intersect.
It is good to stay up to date what happens in the industry. The definition of UX designer varies according to companies. For instance, an UX designer can be referred as visual designer, UX researcher or digital product designer, which seems to be the latest definition of UX designer.
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