Book Image

UX for the Web

By : Marli Ritter, Cara Winterbottom
Book Image

UX for the Web

By: Marli Ritter, Cara Winterbottom

Overview of this book

If you want to create web apps that are not only beautiful to look at, but also easy to use and fully accessible to everyone, including people with special needs, this book will provide you with the basic building blocks to achieve just that. The book starts with the basics of UX, the relationship between Human-Centered Design (HCD), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and the User-Centered Design (UCD) Process; it gradually takes you through the best practices to create a web app that stands out from your competitors. You’ll also learn how to create an emotional connection with the user to increase user interaction and client retention by different means of communication channels. We’ll guide you through the steps in developing an effective UX strategy through user research and persona creation and how to bring that UX strategy to life with beautiful, yet functional designs that cater for complex features with micro interactions. Practical UX methodologies such as creating a solid Information Architecture (IA), wireframes, and prototypes will be discussed in detail. We’ll also show you how to test your designs with representative users, and ensure that they are usable on different devices, browsers and assistive technologies. Lastly, we’ll focus on making your web app fully accessible from a development and design perspective by taking you through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating personas to guide your UX strategy


When talking about personas, one assumes it refers to the target market or segmentation of a campaign or brand, the terms often used in marketing to describe the groups of users a brand or product is marketed to. The traditional target market is usually a collection of users created from data sourced from analytics or market research. Target markets tend to be treated as a clinical entity, like a set of numbers, whereby user research together with analytics and market research make the target market more personal and relatable to all the teams within an organization.

What is a persona? In the UX context a persona is a fictional character with human characteristics, behaviors, and needs based on a segmentation of the target market collected from actual data through field research.

It's a common misperception that personas are created from gut feel, and isolated from actual data, by marketing and UX teams. Actually, personas are more than just a dataset...