Part IV: A day in the life of this user experience designer
The penultimate step in the IDEATE design cycle is “T”: try the alternatives.
For my process, this usually means that we are ready to:
A. Prepare designs for usability testing
GOLD,
B. Go to production
Preparation for usability tests
If we need to prepare visually treated designs for usability testing, then our designs do not necessarily have to be completely accurate to cut and program, but they do have to be clean. What I mean by “clean” is that layouts are sharp, spelling is accurate, and persistent elements (such as navigation menus, headers, footers, global navigation) are placed evenly across all pages that are left. Approve. This ensures that the user is not distracted by small design changes and can focus on navigating the site and completing the tasks being tested.
The ultimate goal of usability testing is to confirm if the visual designs meet our original criteria and if they solve the problems we had in the first place, for example). “User can’t find this feature”, “Buyers get lost in checkout”, “Site doesn’t excite users or feel like our brand.”
Now, testing doesn’t have to be a big, daunting, and expensive endeavor. As mentioned in the last article, it is important to “Test frequently and test ahead”, so take the time to test, or stop and review visual designs with best practices by an unbiased eye during your process, even if it is on a scale smaller than your ideal. Much of the formal usability testing is carried out in a relatively controlled environment with an analyst working closely with preselected users, or remotely using web capture software and devices that allow the analyst and user to interact. communicate.
But usability testing can be as simple as asking a few people in the cubicle down the hall some simple questions to test a display. A great book that I think is quite helpful in making usability more accessible to designers and business owners alike is Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. Check out the chapter “Usability Testing at 10 Cents a Day” for a good read on how to make usability testing an easier part of the process without breaking the bank.
Go to production
If we are ready for production, this means that we are at a point where we have finished refining designs and these designs have met or exceeded our initial design requirements, creating an engaging user experience for our audience. To check our work we can ask ourselves these 4 questions:
* Have we explored enough screens to establish a general design language that can be applied to most of the other pages that may appear later? This is where that sitemap or information architecture diagram comes in handy again for checking my work where I described all the critical screens or page types needed.
* Is the design language clear enough to be easily translated into CSS styles or another global style? In my experience, the best way to communicate the important features of the final visual design is to create a style guide document that specifies the dimensions, fonts, colors, and any unique elements that need to be constructed. Other pages in the style guide specify color codes and text styles.
* Have all the tech notes or key interaction features been demonstrated in our desired interaction streams? This can be accomplished by adding engineering notes to each screen or design. Or for particularly intricate designs, a simple interactive mockup (clickable) can go a long way in communicating the desired effect to our developers.
* Does the development team have all the graphic assets needed to move forward? As a designer, this may mean providing clean, layered Photoshop, Fireworks, or Illustrator files, or just the flattened designs like JPEG or PNG.
If we’ve successfully answered yes to these key questions, then your design is ready to hand over to your client and your development team.
Next week we will return to the starting point with the last step of our IDEATE design loop with the second “E”: evaluate the results.