"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." | ||
| --Henry David Thoreau | ||
It's an exciting time for User Experience (UX). Never before has UX been so much at the forefront of technology and so sought after by companies around the world. It's truly a great time to be a UX practitioner. It has also taken a long time to reach this place. UX has been working hard for years to make an impact on becoming an integral and valued member of the technology team, proving its value and providing organizations with problem-solving techniques and design solutions that promise greater returns on investment (ROI) and happier customers and users. Nevertheless, while UX appears to be highly sought after, garnering high salaries in many areas and seemingly plentiful job opportunities appearing almost daily, there is another story taking place that is not as rosy.
Although UX is more prevalent in business circles, it is still highly misunderstood. A gap exists between how UX sees itself and what stakeholders and executive understand of it. To those at the top as well as managers, stakeholders, project managers, and so on, UX practitioners are thought of as those folks who perform usability studies and wireframes, usually after business requirements have been completed and the development team is about to launch a product. The rest of the time, UX teams can sit idle, waiting to be asked on a project while watching user-facing products continue being released for the public without their help.
Even as calls to customer support increase as revenue from poor design decisions goes down, UX still has trouble proving its value. With the current pace of technology and the competitive nature of interactive designs, it is more important than ever for companies to keep pace and meet the expectations of their customers/users. UX is much more than usability studies and wireframes.
UX is a mindset that requires a deep understanding, strategy, and approach toward design that when aligned to business goals has the potential to go straight to the top, grabbing the attention of those who matter most: those who pay us to deliver results. When the opportunity of writing this book came to me, I was, of course, very excited and also quite challenged. While it's important to share the techniques and skills that UX practitioners need in order to improve their design work, it was also important to focus on UX from a more holistic perspective to understand and explain how it is connected and related to the larger world of design, creativity, and the human experience.
To accomplish this in a book, I provided material that speaks not only to new UX practitioners, but also to anyone at any level, be they technology or business-focused learners and those in the UX field those who want to understand what UX is, what UX does, and how UX can truly provide real, measurable business value business stakeholders find impossible to ignore. You will also find no geekspeak in these pages. Anytime a technical term is introduced, a clear explanation follows. UX is about reaching large audiences with design, and writing about it should be no different. In addition, when we talk only to those in the UX field, we do our profession and ourselves a disservice. UX is about access, ease of use, and engagement. Unless our coworkers understand UX clearly, we cannot expect to deliver clarity to our end users. This is what Practical UX sets out to accomplish.
UX is not going away anytime soon, but if we fail to engage, educate, and prove our value on a consistent and visible basis to our entire audience—customers, users, and business stakeholders—we risk losing our audience for good. Good UX design is more than just look and feel and the most effective place on the screen to put a submit button. Those things are important, but good UX is more importantly about the mindset, creativity, and recognizing that our true value lies in how we think and how we approach our work. We will begin with the mindset of UX and what it means to truly listen to customers/users. We will then move on to creativity and how to identify a truly good design using examples from the Web, mobile, and areas of design that at first may seem far outside the realm of UX, but upon closer inspection are actually inseparable from it. Following that, we will look at how to effectively drive customers, users, and stakeholders to where we want them to go in terms of information architecture, pattern usage, and a strategy that provides stakeholders and business leaders with results that are impossible to ignore. Lastly, we will look at some of the tools of the UX trade as well as resources to expand your learning long after our time together here.
Practical UX is a big subject that will take you down many interesting and hopefully new paths of learning in order to take your design skills and UX knowledge to the highest level of maturity.
Thank you for taking this journey with me. Now, let's begin.
Chapter 1, The User Experience Mindset, looks at some persistent myths about design and customer/user engagement that can make a profession like UX non-existent. Dispelling these myths is the first step, and an important one, for acquiring a UX mindset—the first step of good design.
Chapter 2, Creative UX, looks at how to create six optimal conditions for your best ideas to appear. This will require two modes of thinking, open and closed. Once you acquire the skill to control both of these mindsets creativity and good design will soon follow.
Chapter 3, Good UX Design, identifies ten design principles found in all good UX design, how to identify it and how to recognize it is more than just web design. Good design has no boundaries and this chapter will explain why.
Chapter 4, Foundations of Good IA, will provide you with a broader understanding of Information Architecture (IA) that will give you a wider view of IA and demonstrate that IA is not found in technology.
Chapter 5, Patterns, Properties, and Principles of a Good UX Design, looks at some fundamental properties of patterns that are found is all of the best designs, from UX to music to painting to architecture. Borrowing from a renowned building architect, you will be introduced to fifteen properties that will change the way you look and think about patterns and how to use them in your design work.
Chapter 6, An Essential Strategy for UX Maturity, discusses the challenges that UX faces if its maturity level does not increase. Doing this effectively and rapidly begins with a strategy that transforms how others, like stakeholders and various other colleagues, understand the true value of UX work.
Chapter 7, UX Tools, hows you the most important tools of the UX trade that never go out of style.
Chapter 8, Final Thoughts and Additional Resources, provides resources for continued learning long after you have finished reading this book.
This book is intended for UX practitioner/designers and anyone who is engaged in designing UX for end users, where you are looking to go deep and become fully engaged with your surroundings, team, end users, and your organization. This is also a book for those who are not yet enlightened about the value of UX, those curious about those who may be curious have never taken the time to investigate what UX is all about, this book is also for teachers of UX, IT, and other disciplines where customers and end users are important. The bottom line is that regardless of who you are or where you come from, this book provides a rich, in-depth, and insightful approach to UX that will help you to become a better UX designer, practitioner, thinker and leader.
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