User Experience Design

Research sources:
Google Design
Apple Developer - Human Interface Guidelines
Material Design
SP-AN

User Experience Design (UXD)

UX: What, When, Where, Why and How a user interacts with the product/design.
A UX designer makes the business needs and user needs meet in the middle.
A UX designer takes the users need into account at every stage of the products lifecycle.

HCI - Human Computer Interaction: The ways that people interact with digital systems.
Usability - refers to the ease and efficiency by which a user operates a system. Interaction design is, then, the organisation and construction of interactive elements.

UX refers directly to the ways the that the user/customer/operator experiences using the product/system/interface on their own terms.
UXD is the informed manipulation and development of the factors that influence the user's experience.
Therefore, UXD precedes visual design, UXD informs visual interface design. UX designers will set out the criteria by which the designer will operate.

UXD Process:
Analyse - business research/ user research/ data analysis and conceptualisation
Design - creating concepts/ interaction behaviours/ look and feel
Prototypes - realising design alternatives
Evaluate - verifying and refining

User Research - UX designers commit to a lot of user research. User research seeks to gain a better understanding of the needs of the user. They might do: focus groups, interviews, observations.
Identifying and conceptualising user roles, user needs, task flows etc.

Techniques:

1. Personas - Personas are characteristics of archetypal users. UX designers aim to design the most appealing interface for one or a handful of users - since it is impossible to please everyone it is better to have a small percentage happy than the whole user population half happy.
Personas are fictitious since they likely combine aspects informed from numerous sources. However, they must appear to reflect real people.
Characteristics in personas should:
- Reflect data found in user research
- Focus on the present
- Be realistic not idealistic
- Describe a challenging target user
- Provide insight to the users' context, behaviours, attitudes, needs, challenges/pain points, goals and motivations

2. Taks Flows/ User Flows - Work flows visualise (flow charts) the stages involved in completing certain tasks (task flow) or the journey a user takes through the system (user flow).
An Apple guideline is that to complete a task the task flow should be maximum of 3 steps.

3. Wireframes - Wireframes are the first step towards putting all the user research, personas, workflows etc. into a visual format.
The aim of the wireframes is to experiment and test hierarchies and informed layout strategies. UX designers will always refer back to the personas and workflows to test the wireframe layouts.
Wireframes can be low fidelity, quite simple and general, or they could be more complicated.