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

Doing expert analyses


As a UX practitioner, you must conduct research with real people and users of your products. However, when you first approach any research problem it should be examined and analyzed using your expertise.

This will provide you with a solid foundation for the rest of the research and design. All through a project, you should continue to review the work in this way.

In this section, we will examine two methods that rely on UX practitioners' expertise--heuristic analyses and content audits.

Heuristic analysis

Heuristic analysis is an expert UX research method, where the practitioner evaluates an interface using selected heuristics. Heuristics are practical guidelines for doing work, based on established principles. Heuristic analysis should never replace testing an interface with users; it has been shown that one expert will only find about a third of the usability problems that will occur in a usability test. However, it is very useful to enhance your research. The heuristics...