How many times do you work on your computer during the day? What about your tablet? How often do you pick up your phone to do a quick internet search or find a store nearby? Do you play on your phone while watching TV?
Google asked these questions in their study "The New Multi-Screen World Study: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior," published in 2012.
Why am I talking about this on a UX blog? Because there are some incredibly valuable lessons to be learned about when and how people view your website/app/thing-you-designed-to-be-viewed-on-a-screen.
Perhaps, if you are an inquisitive geek or fond of history, you have heard of Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. I think I may have heard the name in passing at one time or another, but the name didn't mean much to me until the other day when I read a section in this book to my daughter:
Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women
Wherein I realized that Grace Hopper is the most awesome role model ever for a woman following her dreams in the user experience field.
During Aquent Gymnasium's Coding for Designers, the instructor often encouraged us to expand on and practice ideas presented in the class. One assignment was to code the home page for a restaurant website based on a Photoshop comp. Not only did we practice creating pixel perfect CSS, we also learned and experimented with Twitter Bootstrap and Google Web Fonts.
The extra credit assignment for this assignment was to invent our own restaurant and design a Photoshop comp for the desktop version of the home page. Then we had to code the website utilizing Twitter Bootstrap and Google Fonts.
Happy 2014! Want to learn something new? Try a free online course!
I've participated in several during the past year. What I've noticed is that online courses have different goals and different audiences depending on the source. Thus you'll get different things out of each one. Here's an overview of the courses I took. See what works for you.
Happy 2014! Want to learn something new? Try a free online course!
I've participated in several during the past year. What I've noticed is that online courses have different goals and different audiences depending on the source. Thus you'll get different things out of each one. Here's an overview of the courses I took. See what works for you.
This is part eight in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 6 User Testing - Results
After we ran three or more user tests following the procedures we created we had to analyze our observations.
This is part seven in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 6 User Testing
Now the final pieces fell into place as we created test materials and recruited participants.
This is part six in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 5 Ready for Testing
Goal of prototype
The goal of the mobile app is to simplify vehicle maintenance tracking. Specifically, this prototype focuses on the procedure for entering mileage at the time of filling up the fuel tank.
Before moving forward on our high-fidelity prototypes we needed to enumerate the issues found during the heuristic evaluations.
This is part five in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 4 Start Building
In Assignment 4 we began the process of creating a high fidelity prototype based on one of the wireframes we made in Assignment 3. I selected CarBuddy prototype 2.
But first we needed a plan--a development plan.
This is part four in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
An important part of this course is the peer review and self-evaluation process. If you take the process seriously you can learn a huge amount by evaluating the work of other students as well as your own work. Each assignment has a grading rubric to help you figure out what kind of feedback to give and how to score.
The peer review and self-evaluation process for Assignment 3 Wireframing also gave us a chance to practice a common UX technique: heuristic evaluations.
What are heuristic evaluations?
This is part three in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 3 Wireframing
After choosing a concrete direction (Mary Jo's Storyboard in my case) we jumped into the process of prototyping by creating two rapid interactive wireframes that varied in interface, but offered the same basic functionality.
The process of rapid prototyping involves producing your ideas quickly and testing them. Confirm if your designs work as planned. Based on what you learn from those tests make more designs and refine previous ones. Test more. Refine and adjust. Test. Repeat again. Iteration upon iteration to improve and refine the design.
This is part two in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 2 Storyboarding
For assignment two we found design inspirations and decided on a point of view / high-level design strategy:
As I mentioned previously, during April & May 2013 I participated in Scott Klemmer’s Human-Computer Interaction course from Stanford Online.
In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. Helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology. (more)
Over a series of posts I'll share some of my coursework with you. This is the first of the series. Read them all!
One of the wonderful resources shared in Klemmer's HCI course are the articles by Nielsen Norman Group. Specifically, here are three we used to help us evaluate assignments during class. How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation discusses how to use a small set of people to examine an interface for usability issues with a list of criteria (heuristics) as an evaluation tool.
10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design presents some of the most general principles of interaction design. This list can be a good starting point for what to look for when evaluating an interface.
Severity Ratings for Usability Problems provides a way to prioritize the issues found with an interface.
Next up I'll be using these as guidelines as I search the web to find sites with usability issues.
