Seven UX strategy ingredient

The seven UX strategy ingredients I discuss in this article are as follows:

• business strategy
• competitive benchmarking
• Web analytics
• behavioral segmentation, or personas, and usage scenarios
• interaction modeling
• prioritization of new features and functionality
• social / mobile / local

Paul Bryan: 7 Ingredients of a Successful UX Strategy

Four fundamental grips of hands

Four fundamental grips of hands:

• Power grip
• Precision grip
• Hook grip
• Scissor grip<

From: Bret Victor: A brief rant on The Future of Interaction Design

Design principles: Visual Design vs. User experience

Visual Design is the establishment of a philosophy about how to make an impact.

User Experience is the establishment of a philosophy about how to treat people.

Principles of Visual Design:

• Contrast
• Emphasis
• Variety
• Balance
• Proportion
• Repetition
• Movement
• Texture
• Harmony
• Unity

Principles of User Experience:

1. Stay out of people’s way.
2. Create a hierarchy that matches people’sneeds.
3. Limit distractions.
4. Provide strong information scent.
5. Provide signposts and cues.
6. Provide context.
7. Use constraints appropriately.
8. Make actions reversible.
9. Provide feedback.
10. Make a good first impression.

Whitney Hess

Psychology of User Experience

• People Don’t Want to Work: they will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done;
• People Have Limitations: they can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest;
• People Make Mistakes: Assume people will make mistakes. Anticipate what they will be and try to prevent them;
• Human Memory Is Complicated: People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing;
• People are Social: they will always try to use technology to be social. This has been true for thousands of years;
• Attention: Grabbing and holding onto attention, and not distracting someone when they are paying attention to something, are key concerns;
• People Crave Information: Learning is dopaminergic—we can’t help but want more information;
• Unconscious Processing: Most mental processing occurs unconsciously;
• People Create Mental Models: People always have a mental model in place about a certain object or task (paying my bills, reading a book, using a remote control);
• Using Visual Systems can help people.

Susan Weinschenk

Hierarchy of needs

In his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed the idea of a psychological hierarchy of needs in human beings. This hierarchy of need principles specifies that a design must serve the low-level needs (i.e., it must function), before the higher level needs, such as desirability, can begin to be addressed.

• Physiological needs are the requirements for human survival. They include breathing, food, water, shelter, sex, clothing, sleep and comfort.
• Safety needs can be seen as a way to meet tomorrow’s physiological needs. They include personal and financial security, health, order, law and protection from elements.
• Love and belonging needs are about social interactions. We don’t want to go through life alone. Social needs include friendship, love, intimacy, family, community, belonging and relationships.
• Esteem needs include self-esteem as well as recognition from others. Esteem can come in the form of achievement, status, prestige, recognition, mastery, independence and responsibility.
• Self-actualization needs relate to becoming more than what we are, and they can come from peace, knowledge, self-fulfillment, realization of personal potential, personal growth and peak experiences.

Hierearchy of User Experience

• Functionality needs focus on meeting the most basic design requirements. For example, NFC in a customer’s mobile device must provide the capability to make a connection with another NFC object.
• Usability needs have to do with how easy and forgiving a design is to use. For example, configuring your mobile payment preferences to facilitate types of payments and choice of merchants, the interface should be tolerant of errors and mistakes.
• Reliability needs are about establishing stable and consistent performance. For example, if lack of interoperability between mobile payment partners results in a service that behaves erratically or is subject to frequent failure, reliability needs will not be satisfied.
• Confidence needs address security, customer support, contact methods, policies, and giving users control. For example, a mobile payment service must ensure privacy and security of customer’s personal and financial information. A breach in this will result in lack of trust and result in non-adoption.
• Desirability needs focus on personalization, community, flexibility, and customization. For example, if a mobile payment service allows customers to personalize and control their payment experience, and creates a seamless experience across product, services, and channels, desirability needs will be satisfied.

From: Perry Chan and Steven Bradley

Insights from the ‘Kano Model’

Core metrics for customer experience:

1. Basic attributes (Fulfilling expectations about core functionality)
2. Performance attributes (Exceeding expectations about core functionality)
3. Delight attributes (Unexpected moments of delight)

“The three attributes types are mapped in a coordinate system with “Customer Satisfaction” up the x-axis and “Degree of Achievement” (how well a given feature is executed in your product) along the y-axis.”

Summary:

• The details don’t matter if you don’t get the fundamentals right, so the basic attributes need to work flawlessly before you focus on anything else.
• You don’t need to match every single performance attribute in the market head-on. Align your investments in performance attributes with the target audience of the product – this may of course vary significantly and warrant different variations of the same product.
• Delivering unexpected delight attributes is what fuels word-of-mouth. Once you’ve secured the basic attributes and some performance attributes, you should begin brainstorming on what delight attributes you can offer as this is what will truly set you apart from the competition.
• Today’s delight attribute is tomorrow’s performance attribute, and six months from now it may very well be a basic attribute. Customer expectations continually increase so you have to continually reiterate and reinvent your offerings.
• Having a deep understanding of the true needs of your customers, their context and their behavior, is absolutely crucial when inventing new delight attributes. Looking at what your competitors are doing won’t help much as the delight attribute will no longer be a delight by the time you have imitated it.

Christian Holst: UX and the Kano Model

Designing for speed

• Mobile experiences fill the gaps while we wait. Nobody wants to wait while they wait. Mobile needs to be fast.
• To make things on mobile feel really fast you need to invest in back-end and front-end design –in design and engineering. Design can be a speed feature.
• Upload is what got people most excited about the speed of Instagram early on. Most apps upload only after they have all the info they need. Instagram uploads right away while you fill in the rest of the information about your photo like captions and location. This is a non-optimal engineering solution but it makes the app feel much faster. It’s worth it even if you throw the photo away.

…

Mike Krieger of Instagram at the Warm Gun, quoted by L Wroblewslki

User interface best practices

• Be welcoming
• Know thy user
• Let the content shine
• Make selections fast and error-free
• Provide appropriate feedback
• Minimize the pain

Ginsburg 2011: p. 192

Use scenarios

Scenarios can help uncover gaps in solutions and potential usability issues.

Motivation

• What prompted the persona to embark on the scenario

Context

• Where is the persona while the scenario takes place?
• Does the context change over the course of the scenario?
• Who else is involved?
• What other devices are involved?

Distractions

• What kinds of distractions or interruptions typically occur in the scenario?
• How does the persona deal with such distractions?

Goal

• What is the persona’s goal in the scenario?
• Is it information, an artifact, an emotion?

Ginsburg 2011: P.82

Common User Research Questions

• User needs
• Context of Use
• Perceptions (pre-conceptions)
• Pain points
• Language and nomenclatura
• Norms

Gainsburg 2011: p.40