The best approach to user experience (UX) design

Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Dean Whitney in User Experience   and has   0 Comments

There are many approaches to designing the user experience (UX). The challenge for teams is how much time and effort should be invested in the formative stages.

Take your time and do it right…

There is a cost benefit to the level of quality achieved in design and how well the experience suits the needs of the users. To a certain degree the more time, effort and money invested the better the result. There’s a tipping point where risk is introduced by spending too much time without real market feedback.

…or keep it simple and launch quickly

On the other hand there’s a cost benefit to releasing a product sooner. Typically you will scale back features, simplify the solution and spend less money. This reduces the risk of project failures like scope creep and building features that users may not want.

I cut it three times and it’s still too short

When I was in high school I worked on houses in the summer. If you were going to cut a piece of wood you would measure and mark a pencil line with a square, hold it between your hand and boot and cut with a skill saw. If you were going to cut a palette of boards you may take some time to set up your work area and saw horses. You would make a template using a thin board cut to length with a block nailed to the end. You would perfectly align a dozen boards side by side and pencil mark the first and last. You’d then drop a chalk line across all the boards to you could quickly cut them. Like cutting boards UX projects require varying degrees of planning, preparation and process.

Doing it the “right” way

The traditional long-format approach would begin with research and stakeholder workshops, card sorting,  content maps followed by white boarding, sketch prototypes and/or storyboards. These artifacts would be used to get further insight and direction to create detailed wireframes, flowcharts and site maps or content matrices to represent every screen and use case permutation. This could be followed by further research with paper or HTML prototypes testing users representing each target user persona.

This approach is well suited for large projects with many stakeholders and a large constituency of benefactors as well as an enormous budget and long schedule. This applied to building complex systems such as electronic medical records or self checkout lanes for the supermarket makes sense but not for smaller more focused projects.

Process from workshops to detailed wireframes

Agile Design

The agile approach goes directly from sketches to the HTML prototype. Using simple markup and HTML elements the interfaces are created and linked together using placeholder data. Often the data is in a flat file or XML document or even hand coded in the HTML. Using progressive enhancement design elements are build up to improve the visual display. Javascript and jQuery further enhances the user experience to simplify tasks and improve usability based on real-feedback. The application developers are building the functionality in parallel and as they complete features they integrate the presentation tier and work on pushing real data where placeholder data had been displayed.

This allows for the entire team, stakeholders and end-users to start to “click-around” and offer real insight into the solution. This approach made popular by 37 Signals Founder Jason Fried as he often remarks that they don’t have any information architects. They go from sketches on notepads, napkins and/or whiteboards to mark-up and code.

Sketches Example: would inform HTML Prototype

High-Fidelity Design

This approach leverages talented designers that are subject matter experts with deep insight into use cases, target users and success metrics as well as the latest trends in user interface technology and design patterns.  The design is informed by a list of features or story cards. All screens are designed as a pixel perfect simulation with real-looking content, the goal being to create the illusion that the project is already done. With minimal revisions the screen set is transformed into mark-up and integrated into back-end software.

Well suited for time sensitive marketing solutions and web applications this approach considers the time to market value can yield a higher return than quality issues resulting from the quick design.The goal is to go to market within 30 days with a clear plan for integrating and prioritizing user feedback and pushing iterative builds daily for the following 30 days. By getting the solution in market 30 to 60 days earlier and using real user feedback and web analytics to manage the evolution this approach holds the potential of yielding a much higher ROI. Especially where the project is time sensitive or in a highly competitive space.

What’s your approach?

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