Wednesday, 29 October 2014

OUGD504 - Study Task 7 - User Experience Design (UXD)

Examples and Techniques

UXD is not only how usable a product and it's interface is, but also the role that the product plays within someones day to day life, the emotional attachment the person has to the product, and the identity of the company that makes the product. 

A good example of this is the iPhone, which became a lot more popular than the BlackBerry because a lot more thought was given to the UXD. It's also happened with Facebook over MySpace.

Techniques for good UXD are.

  • User Research - Questionnaires and focus groups etc.
  • Personas - Using the ideal user of your website to identify how your website should be. What are the users goals, what is their behaviour like, and how does that affect what your website should and shouldn't do?
  • Content Strategy - Based on the previous two things, what content is needed for the website to succeed, and how should the hierarchy work?
  • Task Flow - How does someone do something?
  • Wireframe - How will the content be structured?
  • A/B Testing - Testing a variation of a system against the original system.

Specific Applications

The persona of the type of person that my website would be most useful to would be that of a younger middle aged person hosting a dinner party who was wanting ideas for food, most likely a woman, or a mum looking for ideas for unique and interesting toppings for pancakes. Something like below.


























The task flow  of someone like this would be something like:

  • Enter the website
  • Find the appropriate blog for their needs
  • Scroll until they find a post that they like the look on
  • Click on the post for more information


Garrett's Model of UXD

We also considered how Garrett's model of UXD could be applied to our own websites.
In my instance, it can be applied this way:

Strategy - Make people hungry
Scope - Big pictures and endless scrolling
Structure - Images should be the main thing on the website, and the layout should be consistent throughout the site to make users feel more familiar.
Skeleton - Use the golden ratio for it's "natural" connotations. Make all pages link up.
Surface - Clean, natural, and mainly unbranded, to keep attention on the images.



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