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 article from Smashing Magazine is definitely worth reading. It talks about how small interaction details can significantly improve the user experience. And it provides nice animations to demonstrate each concept. Smart Transitions In User Experience Design By Adrian Zumbrunnen
Every design needs a first draft. Three is even better! Brainstorming different ideas gives you several advantages over just charging down the first path you think of:
Lately, it seems like my life has been filled with stories, tellers of stories, promoters of stories, and promoting with stories.
First, and most obvious, having a child in the house leads to lots and lots and lots of stories. And as I tell these stories, whether from a book or my head, I find myself asking whether the story I'm telling sends the right message. Does it teach my child a life lesson that is important? Does it teach good coping mechanisms?
Does the story show how to be an adaptable, compassionate and thoughtful person by example?
Calling all current and aspiring Interaction Designers! I just found a spiffy resource for you:
Open educational materials - made by the world's design elite
That tagline is certainly calling my name!
They boast quite a collection of open access textbooks to further your design knowledge. There are also videos, research, courses, conferences, a design library, curated toolbox and an educational initiative.
Most of the content is free outright and a few things are free if you join the organization.
It looks promising! I'm heading that way now...
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.
