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.
As you may already know, I am a knitwear designer. This means I come up with ideas for things I think other people may want to knit and make them. Then, and this is the part that distinguishes a knitwear designer from a knitter, I teach other people how to make exactly the same thing by writing a pattern. A pattern is like a recipe. It conveys the information necessary to recreate the original.
As part of the process to fine tune my UX skills I am consulting with several small businesses to develop their websites. One of the businesses is an independent yarn dyer wanting to expand into online sales. To get a feel for their target audience I interviewed local yarn store employees. The customer base for a small yarn store strongly overlaps the customer base for an independent yarn dyer. In both cases, customers know that other options besides big box craft stores exist and are willing to pay premium prices for high quality goods.
Long-term yarn store employees have a great sense of the types of people who come in to shop or call with questions along with the goals and concerns those people have. After the information gathering sessions I compiled these insights into customer archetypes.
For quite a while I was stuck while in the process of designing my online portfolio. I had some ideas. I had some projects. I had some blog posts. What I didn't have was a plan.
How should the information be presented? How were all these various examples connected? What if a prospective employer wanted to know about my design process? What if someone wanted to see examples of a specific skill? What if a particular example falls under both categories--would I need to write about it in two different locations?
Luckily I've been studying user experience techniques.
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?
