User Experience (UX) design is the act and art of crafting the interface and interactions for a website or application. It is a multidisciplinary career path that requires one to be part visual designer, part social psychologist, a little bit of a developer, and a hint of a project manager, as well as possess a great deal of empathy for those whom you are designing for.
As you will hopefully gather from reading this book, UX design is a career that is responsible for several varied tasks. As with any multidisciplinary career, it is difficult to find anyone with every skill or talent in his or her bag of tricks that are needed. This is to be expected, and I suppose appreciated. It is common to have researchers, scientists, psychologists, developers, and of course, graphic designers change careers to become UX designers to fill the ever-growing need. Each of these bring with them a particular strength that tends to direct them to focus or specialize on a particular aspect of design. Regardless of this unique focus, there are certain universal principles and processes that need to be understood by all.
Whether you are looking to become a professional UX designer or you can't find one and just need to get the job done, the principles and processes discussed in this book will help you get started.
This introduction to user experience design will walk you through what could be described as the industry-standard design process. It will describe the type of research and groundwork that should occur prior to starting your actual design effort. It will also explain several design techniques commonly used by industry professionals. And, it will point out solutions to problems commonly encountered when designing the frontend for websites and applications.
The core philosophy being applied here is as follows:
User experience design is the act of finding answers to visual and logical questions
The design process defines the order in which the questions need to be asked
Design techniques offer a methodology to answer the questions you are asking
On a personal note, I am pleased to offer an introductory summary of my years of experience as a UX designer. I do so with the hope that it will help you avoid the many pitfalls inherent in the software design process. May you find success in all that you design. Let's get started!
Chapter 1, The Design Process, explains the importance of research in the design process.
Chapter 2, Example Project – E-commerce Website, comprises of an example project detailing the process of wireframing a website.
Chapter 3, Example Project – Mobile Device Application, covers how to apply the design process to an example design project for a mobile device.
Chapter 4, Research Techniques, gives a brief description of several more commonly used techniques that we need to familiarize ourselves with.
Chapter 5, Information Architecture and Visual Design Techniques, covers a few of the many Information-Architecture-related techniques that have been developed to assist in the filtering and ordering of information. We will also touch upon some of the visual design techniques that we need to be aware of.
Having access to a wireframing application will be extremely helpful. This book will not focus on any particular application. Instead, it will cover UX design concepts that can be applied to whichever application you choose to use. Desktop applications such as Axure, Omnigraffle, and Visio are commonly used by design professionals. There are also many web-based wireframing applications that can be used. Some of these include Balsamiq, Moqups, UXPin, HotGloo, and QuirckTools. Many of these online options are free to use or free to try. I would recommend trying several to discover one that best meets your needs.
This book is an introduction to UX design. If you are interested in learning the basics of the design process, as well as several techniques and methodologies to help you get started designing, then this book is for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Imagine that during the research phase of the project with our last client, futbolfinder.com."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "This particular wireframe shows where the user would be taken if they tapped on the Coach & Referee category button on the home page."
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