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

Deciding what, when, and how to prototype


Moodboards and storyboards are mostly used in the concept stages of design, when the team is deciding what features to include in the design and roughly what they might look like. The next stage of design is when you begin working out exactly what the web pages will look like and how they will work. This is where prototypes come into the picture.

A prototype is an early, unfinished version of a product, built to test one or more aspects of that product.

For website design, anything from a rough sketch on paper to HTML and CSS code can serve as a prototype, depending on what you want to test and with whom. Although prototypes don't have to be inherently interactive, they are usually made to test interaction with some part of the product.

Prototypes take time to create and are not the final product; they are usually thrown away. There are several benefits to prototyping that make this time and effort worthwhile:

  • Concrete: Prototypes are concrete versions...