User Experience Design

User eXperienceDesign

@asadsafariFor presenting on #TOSS

User Experience

n. the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system

User Experience is multifaceted

Joshua Porter

“The innovation in these applications is not that they let us do something new, but that they allow us to do what we already do better, more often, in more places, and more quickly. “

(commenting on Web 2.0 interfaces)

6 LessonsAbout UX

Lesson 1:

Place better ‘experiences’ ahead of more features.

Lesson 2:

Start with actual experiences.

Lesson 2:

Start with actual experiences.

Cell phones do all kinds of stuff—calling, text messaging, web browsing, contact management, music playback, photos and video—but they do it very badly, by forcing you to press lots of tiny buttons, navigate diverse heterogeneous interfaces and squint at a tiny screen. “Everybody hates their phone,” Jobs says, “and that’s not a good thing. And there’s an opportunity there.”

Lesson 2:

Start with actual experiences.

Lesson 3:

Solve the real problems.

Lesson 3:

Solve the real problems.

“Your phone’s got feet on,” he says, not unkindly. “Why would anybody put feet on a phone?” Ive has the answer, of course: “It raises the speaker on the back off the table. But the right solution is to put the speaker in the right place in the first place. That’s why our speaker isn’t on the bottom, so you can have it on the table, and you don’t need feet.” Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone’s smooth lines.

Lesson 4:

Play to think.

Lesson 4:

Play to think.

The iPhone developed the way a lot of cool things do: with a false start. A few years ago Jobs noticed how many development dollars were being spent... on tablet PCs. ...so he had Apple engineers noodle around with a tablet PC. When they showed him the touch screen they came up with, he got excited. So excited he forgot all about tablet computers.

Lesson 5:

Treat interfaces like conversations

Lesson 5:

Treat interfaces like conversations

When you need to dial, it shows you a keypad; when you need other buttons, the screen serves them up. When you want to watch a video, the buttons disappear. Suddenly, the interface isn’t fixed and rigid, it’s fluid and molten. Software replaces hardware.

Lesson 6:

Obsess on the details.

Lesson 7:

Obsess on the details.

Unlike most competitors, Apple also places an inordinate emphasis on interface design. It sweats the cosmetic details that don’t seem very important until you really sweat them. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to look to make sure every pixel is right,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s head of Platform Experience (whatever that is). “We will argue over literally a single pixel.” As a result, when you swipe your finger across the screen to unlock the iPhone, you’re not just accessing a system of nested menus, you’re entering a tiny universe, where data exist as bouncy, gemlike, animated objects that behave according to consistent rules of virtual physics.

So, what does UX Team do?

We makeThings workFOR PEOPLE

Things we’ll do (that you might care about)• map ‘stories’ back to Activities — so

product releases make sense!• contribute to real product ownership

(YEAH!) • create less rework• develop reusable code.• make our products more valuable

“We set about rethinking the UI from the user’s perspective, which is ‘results-oriented,’ rather than from the developer’s perspective, which tends to be ‘feature-oriented’ or ‘command-oriented’– thereby enabling people to focus on what they want to do rather than on how they do it.”

(commenting on the new UI of Office 12)