Product Manager: Simon Mackie

Technical Editor: Diana MacDonald

Expert Reviewer: Matt Magain

Indexer: Fred Brown

Editor: Kelly Steele

Cover Designer: Alex Walker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty. Ltd., nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.

Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

Jodie Moule is co-founder and director of Symplicit, an experience design consultancy based in Australia that focuses on research, strategy, and design services. With a background in psychology, her understanding of human behavior is central to helping businesses see their brands through the eyes of customers, influencing the way they approach the design of their products, systems, and processes.

SitePoint specializes in publishing practical, rewarding, and approachable content for web professionals. Visit http://www.sitepoint.com/ to access our books, blogs, newsletters, videos, and community forums.

This chapter defines UX design and considers what makes a great experience. Youll learn why this should matter to you when designing.If youre unable to understand the problem, you cant solve it. This chapter explores the problem that your client or company aims to solve with the UX process, and explains some useful ways to ensure your for success.In order to produce great usable designs, you need to gain empathy and understanding for your users. Well address all the research methods available to you and look at how to recruit users for testing.In this chapter, we discuss how to analyze the data youve collected from your user testing. Then well delve into behavior design and reveal why understanding behavior and habits is intrinsic to your design work.Once weve conducted an analysis, we move towards using sketching as a tool. Sketching is cost-effective and easy to do, and helps to generate lots of ideas quickly so that you can select a few really great ones to take to the next stage.Forming working models of your design is the best way to assess whether your solutiononce imagined beyond paperis going to work or not. Creating rapid prototypes to refine your thought process and ensure youre on the right track is a critical step in your UX process.The whole reason for creating prototypes is to test them with your users, in order to validate whether your design is worth pursuing. This process allows you to ascertain whether users understand your design, and allows for further refining. Final tweaks now will give you confidence that the decisions youve made along the way are the right ones.This final chapter focuses on testing and evaluating your solution as you prepare to launchand beyond. Once youve let it loose on the market, youll continue to learn from users habits and behaviors as they use your product, bringing your UX process full circle .