session 3: sketching and user-centered design

Sketching and User-Centered DesignSession 3 - April 10, 2014School of Visual Concepts - UX1

http://svc-ux1.leannagingras.com

AGENDA

Good designDesign rules of thumbSketchingCritiqueStudio

GOOD DESIGN

LOL j/k

https://www.marmosetmusic.com/singles?

http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/mobile-apps

QuizUp

Street art is beautiful & serves a civic function

DESIGN RULES OF THUMB

Menus: Example of organizing genre to help the user quickly zoom into what they want.

Kickstarter has several groupings here: Information related to a featured project, kickstarter categories, and Seattle kickstarter projects.

Pick an organization principle that makes sense for the content and context. For example, sometimes alphabetical organization makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t.

Organizing alphabetically makes more sense for a big list of majors.

Kickstarter is a good example of visual hierarchy that does what it should: elevate the most important elements to the user. Note that the biggest element on the page isn’t stanard: $money$

SongCloud stream is a good example of organization and visual hierarchy. Presents it song-first and associates all of the related action s with that.

Go where the action is: Putting this sign on top of the thermostat is more effective than putting it in the break room or kitchen.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/designingwebinterfaces/4506200490/

(Avoid dead ends...or at least give users an exit.)

That’s a lot of stuff to present to the user all at once. Break it up into steps to make it easier.

Filters help users arrow their choices down.

Uber’s mobile experience also limits choices by eliminating account functionality.

This site’s structure is broad, deep in some places, narrow in others, and has a single instance of a third level - (probably) not very good curation of choices.

This is a more consistent and guided structure.

A sitemap from my colleague Dan Cooney. He can’t just get rid of pages, so he will creates a hierarchy that will make it easy for the user to narrow down to what they want.

How can we make this better?

Eastern Mountain Sports

How can we make this better?

City of Seattle

SKETCHING

From Bill Buxton’s “Sketching the User Experience”

Messy, fast, not perfect.

Example: Refining through a particular interaction

Example: this is a later iteration of a sketch. It has just enough detail to communicate the core design idea, no more.

Since sketches are fast, lo-fi and disposable, they’re perfect for brainstorming, capturing options, and exploring ideas without getting lost in the details.

People generate better ideas individually, and refine ideas better collaboratively.

example: designing a mobile menu

I needed a responsive menu that works for a big retailer. First, I generated a bunch of ideas and patterns to make it easier to compare my options.

I picked a couple and fleshed them out a little bit.

I knew something similar to Option 4 - the off-canvas sliding menu - had worked for Trina Turk.

...but I wasn’t sure how it would work for a site with two levels of hierarchy, so I sketched it out a little more and refined from there.

how was that?

take 5 minutes. work individually on a first pass. we’ll come back to this later...

Sketches are for generating and working through ideas, but also for communicating ideas as a boundary object. it allows critique.

Let’s present.

Walk through not just your final sketch, but the steps you took to get there.

Studio

If you don’t have a project, find someone who does.Get on the same page re: project goals.Pick a key task & sketch for 5 minutes.

Then bring your ideas together & work on it together.