UX Design
Out of context: Reply #3
- Started
- Last post
- 11 Responses
- orrinward20
Everything in the circle can help with UX, but when you're doing 'UX Design' you should really be focusing mainly on HCI, IA and your Content.
Lets say Bob wants to do buy a photo of a cat online.
Your job as a UX cowboy is to find out the key things that Bob needs to do to buy a photo of a cat online and give him an easy and intuitive ride to go through that process. If you're doing it well, Bob will have a photo of a cat without any hassle. If you're doing it really well he'll go away thinking 'This cat picture is great but wow, that was easy and fun to order it'.
A lot of UX design is management of all the competing factors in this bubble. In my job, I define the "User Experience" aspect as strictly 2 things:
1. The journey a user needs to go through to perform the new function. eg. To buy a new cat, Bob needs to find the website, find the cat photo he wants, choose delivery and pay
2. The basic layout all the things he sees/interacts with in this journey. This includes buttons, copy etc.Anything beyond basic layout and page architecture stuff I refer to as the visual design. When I show my boss a layout mock and he starts talking about font size and colour, I push back and tell him we're not at that stage yet.
When we have a UX crit, we cut it down strictly to experience flow:
"Why does he need to confirm at this stage?"
"Should he really be paying before selecting delivery?"Feedback such as "The thumbnails need to be bigger" is a visual issue that will positively affect UX, but in our process, it isn't covered at the UX design stage. We make all our visual design decisions with consideration for the UX, but our UX design stage doesn't consider the visual much.