About Face
Chp. 1-3 Summary
Software and technology are not as user friendly as they hoped they would be. They have trouble meeting the user’s needs, and properly functioning. They are also overly complicated and ask a million annoying or difficult questions, makes users feel dumb. Tend to put coding over design, which leads to difficulties in being user friendly or appealing. Softwares needs to find a balance between function and user wants. Generally struggle to understand the everyday user’s ability to get tasks done on their programs because they are just too difficult.
Misplaced priorities: on the part of both product management and development teams.
Ignorance about real users: of the product and what their baseline needs are for success
Conflicts of interest: when development teams are charged with both designing and building the user experience.
Lack of a design process: that permits knowledge about user needs to be gathered, analyzed, and used to drive the development of the end experience.
Best Research Routine to most accurately and effectively create a design.
Kickoff meeting - Basic questions to stockholders, or th bosses
Literature review - any internal documents for branding or marketing, web searches for competitors.
Product/prototype and competitive audits - Look for inspiration or more knowing about product through prototypes.
Stakeholder interviews - finding out the vision, also budget and schedule, and tech restraints
Subject matter expert (SME) interviews - discuss with them because they are very knowledgeable about the domain, but realize that they do not know design and some of their solutions can cause greater problems.
User and customer interviews - customers are not the same as users, diff groups, but customers are mainly Users. Important to ask what qualities they want to see, ex: parents who buy something for their kids.
User observation/ethnographic field studies - main focus of design because they are the ones that use the Product. Ask what they want to fix or change that is hard for them. Or watch them do it in a different setting so they do not feel dumb for saying something is challengng.
After completing all your deep research and observing a bunch of users and customers, you need to start creating models and personas. Do not create one single persona, but create multiple personas, based on different groupings of users. With that than you can create/design a product that is useful, or want that specific personas like. This may lead you to multiple different products, but with very happy users.
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