Lakshmi Narasimhan C

How to make the User Experience better

User experience (UX) focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and their limitations. It also takes into account the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project. UX best practices promote improving the user’s interaction with and perceptions of your product and any related services.

Factors that Influence UX

At the core of UX is ensuring that users find value in what you are providing to them.  Peter Morville represents this through his User Experience Honeycomb 

He notes that for there to be a meaningful and valuable user experience, information must be:

Helpful: Your content should be original and fulfil a need

Usable: The site must be easy to use

Desirable: Image, identity, brand, and other design elements, are used to evoke emotion and appreciation

Findable: Content needs to be navigable and locatable onsite and offsite

Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities

Credible: Users must trust and believe what you tell them

Areas Related to Building the User Experience

UX is a growing field that is very much still defined. Creating a successful user-centred design encompasses the principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) and goes further to include the following disciplines:

Project Management focuses on planning and organizing a project and its resources. Includes identifying and managing the lifecycle to be used, applying it to the user-centred design process, formulating the project team, and efficiently guiding the team through all phases until project completion.

User Research focuses on understanding user behaviours, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

Usability Evaluation focuses on how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals. It also refers to how satisfied users are with that process.

Information Architecture (IA) focuses on how information is organized, structured, and presented to users.

User Interface Design: focuses on anticipating what users might need to do and ensuring that the interface has easy access, understanding, and use to facilitate those actions. 

Interaction Design (IxD) focuses on creating engaging, interactive systems with well thought out behaviours.

Visual Design focuses on ensuring an aesthetically pleasing interface that is in line with brand goals.

Content Strategy focuses on writing and curating helpful content by planning its creation, delivery, and governance.

Accessibility focuses on how a disabled individual accesses or benefits from a site, system or application. Section 508 is the governing principle for accessibility.

Web Analytics focuses on the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data.

Infographic: is graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human optical system’s ability to see patterns and trends.

References

•         usability.gov