Book Image

Practical UX Design

By : Scott Faranello
Book Image

Practical UX Design

By: Scott Faranello

Overview of this book

Written in an easy-to-read style, this book provides real-world examples, a historical perspective, and a holistic approach to design that will ground you in the fundamental essentials of interactive design, allow you to make more informed design decisions, and increase your understanding of UX in order to reach the highest levels of UX maturity. As you will see, UX is more than just delighting customers and users. It is also about thinking like a UX practitioner, making time for creativity, recognizing good design when you see it, understanding Information Architecture as more than just organizing and labeling websites, using design patterns to influence user behavior and decision making, approaching UX from a business perspective, transforming your client’s and company’s fundamental understanding of UX and its true value, and so much more. This book is an invaluable resource of knowledge, perspective, and inspiration for those seeking to become better UX designers, increase their confidence, become more mature design leaders, and deliver solutions that provide measurable value to stakeholders, customers, and users regardless of project type, size, and delivery method.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Practical UX Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mental models


Here is another example of a supermarket:

Although you can't smell the flowers or the rotisserie chicken in the preceding image, this virtual supermarket is no doubt designed according to specific customer expectations, what practitioners call mental models. Mental models help designers understand how customers/users think about how something should work based on their past experiences in similar situations. Without knowing the users mental model, we are simply guessing and making assumptions about what we think our users want. This is "faster horses" thinking and something we want to avoid at all costs. There is no substitute for research, observation, and testing of our solutions with real users, regardless of how certain we may feel about our work. Remember that the risk of being wrong is far greater than the time it takes to make sure we are right.