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

Customer-centric business model design

• What job)s) do(es) our customer need to get done and how can we help? What are our customer’s aspiratins and how can ewe help him live up to them?
• How do our customers prefer to be addressed? How do we, as an enterprise best fit into their routines?
• What relationship do our customers expect us to establish with them?
• For what value(s) are customers truly willing to pay?

Osterwalder, A. & Pigneur, Y.: Business Model Generation; Hoboken, NJ:2010. pages 129

User Centered Design

The central idea behind UCD is that designers create experiences based on a rich and nuanced understanding of observed and implied user needs over time. UCD grew out of a functional, usability-oriented philosophy that began in the workplace, but it has since expanded beyond the purely functional to take into account many dimensions of the user’s experience, including emotional needs and motivations.

Robert Fabricant: Design With Intent

User Interface Flow Models

Another common diagram to create is a user interface (UI) navigation or UI-flow diagram (…) to explore how you will architect the UI of your system by exploring the flow between major UI elements, including both screens/pages and reports. This is critical to your system’s success because the user interface is the system to your stakeholders. Not the technology. Not the data. Not really cool frameworks that you’re working with. If you do not architect the user interface effectively you run the risk that you will build a system that your stakeholders aren’t interested in working with. See example from the book ‘Maturing usability‘

Scott W Ambler

Jonathan Ive: Apple design strategy > no focus groups

So how did the company decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” he (Jonathan Ive) said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/listening_to_mr_iphone.html

Only one activity is primary

“The applications people find most compelling allow them to excel at a single activity.”

Porter 2008, p.25

Find out about this single activity and focus design around it. Define overall goal, primary activity and actual tasks associated with the activity.

Social Design

“Social design is the conception, planning, and production of web sites and applications that support social interaction.”

Joshua Porter 2008, p. 5

Hurdles to overcome

Hurdles for users to overcome in order to ‘subscribe’ to social software:
1. They have to pay attention
2. They have to make a sign-up decision
3. They have to input personal information
4. They have to pay money.
5. They are making a decision for someone else.
6. They have to give up their current way of doing things.

Joshua Porter (2008)