Allanwood Gavin - Basics Interactive Design: User Experience Design: Creating designs users really love

Gavin Allanwood is a practitioner in Digital Media Design, and Course Leader in Digital and Interactive Media at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

Peter Beare is an expert in multidisciplinary approaches to digital media design and teaches Media Technology at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

Also available from Bloomsbury

The Fundamentals of Interactive Design

Interface Design: An Introduction to Visual Communication in UI Design

The Principles and Processes of Interactive Design

www.fairchildbooks.com

www.bloomsbury.com

0.0 Urban Screen
Gigantic fingers appear to distort the walls of the Kunsthalle building in Hamburg, via a projection from Urban Screen (see ).

Table of contents

Introduction

This book is for you if you are learning about interactive design and plan to be involved in creating a product or service for other people to use. We aim to introduce you to a way of thinking that will help you see that excellence in design depends on more than just creative skills. By carefully considering the factors that combine to create a good user experience, your work will be more effective and ultimately much more rewarding.

The user experience design tag UXD when applied to creative interactive design conveys a message that means we understand what it takes to give our users a good experience. UXD is an offshoot of plain user experience UX, a set of methods that can be applied to just about every activity involving human interaction. Designers who understand and apply UXD approaches can give their clients a strong competitive advantage. As we move into an era where a great deal of published media is expected to be dynamic and interactive it becomes much more important to consider the user experience.

There are five chapters, five practical exercises, three interviews and one case study in this book. Together they combine to demystify the subject and provide you with the necessary foundation knowledge to start to apply a UXD approach to your own work. The first chapter will get you thinking about human experience; then you will progress to understanding users, and in chapters 3, 4 and 5 you will recognize and apply the principal methods of experience design. At the end of the book we introduce tools and processes for evaluating user experience. We expect that your users will be delighted with your work and it is always good to record those nice comments somewhere.

0.1 A UXD approach
At the time of writing there is strong demand for people who can apply a UXD approach, including skills in user research, responsive design and the optimization of website traffic.

0.2 AIGA Design Archives created by Second Story
The design incorporates many tools for browsing and offers the user plenty of opportunity for research and discovery.

1 What is User Experience Design (UXD)?

In this chapter, we explore the idea that human experience of the modern world is almost entirely influenced by human design. We expand on that idea and apply it to the field of interactive design, explaining how designers have adopted roles, built teams and applied a range of approaches to improve the user experience. We then show how a design agency is successfully applying the UXD approach and we provide a brief team activity so that you can gain an understanding of different user contexts.

Designing interactive experiences

UXD is a collection of methods applied to the process of designing interactive experiences. It encourages the interactive designer to make the quality of the users experience the prime concern. The logic behind this approach is simple. In UXD terms, the product of a design is only a success if it meets the needs of the client who commissioned it and provides a good experience for the intended users. Products or services that offer a poor user experience, or fail to keep up with the expectations of users, will sooner or later be replaced by improved designs.

User experience design needs a careful balance of what is good for the user and what can be accomplished within the constraints of time, budget and other resources. Generally, it requires a team effort because what is required to give users a good experience is not immediately apparent and may need expertise from a number of different areas.

More people are needed to advocate the idea that designers can do more for their users. People who challenge the status quo and highlight the unintelligent, frustrating and generally life-sapping designs that dim our world. Perhaps you could become one of these people? For inspiration there are some great people out there who are now regarded as gurus of UX. These include Donald Norman, described by Business Wee k as one of the worlds most influential designers and also a curmudgeon, Steve Krug who has written an internationally best-selling book Dont Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2000) and Jakob Neilsens who has been described by Internet Magazine as The King of Usability.

Its not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes, beauty to peoples lives.

Donald Norman

1.11.2 Style-Passport website
The website for Style-Passport (style-passport.com (no longer available), designed by Maek) does more than emulate the visual design of glossy fashion magazines. The archetypal user will often make decisions about fashion and shopping that considers complex factors such as what-goes-with-what and who-else-is-wearing-it. The website has a structure and appearance that understands and facilitates this type of behaviour. UXD is about understanding the users and their context, rather than trying to impress them with visual flair.

Lifes experiences

If everything around you that is the product of a design process was taken away, what would remain? The climate defies our attempts to design its behaviour and so we create environments that protect us from it when needed. In almost every other respect, humans create the conditions that define our living experience.

Our use of language, fashion trends and the development of music evolve through human behaviour and social interaction. User experience designers need to try to understand the behaviour of the people they are designing for and create work that blends well with evolved systems.

Much of the quality of our life experience depends on the products of design that we encounter on our way. We have expectations, we can make choices and, if we are lucky, we can choose how we want to live our lives. Designers need to consider the impact of their work on the people they are designing for and create work that shows an understanding of their needs.