Successful User Experience: Strategies and Roadmaps

Elizabeth Rosenzweig

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780128010617
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: UI/UX Design

Successful User Experience: Strategy and Roadmaps provides you with a hands-on guide for pulling all of the User Experience (UX) pieces together to create a strategy that includes tactics, tools, and methodologies. Leveraging material honed in user experience courses and over 25 years in the field, the author explains the value of strategic models to refine goals against available data and resources. You will learn how to think about UX from a high level, design the UX while setting goals for a product or project, and how to turn that into concrete actionable steps. After reading this book, you'll understand:

• How to bring high-level planning into concrete actionable steps
• How Design Thinking relates to creating a good UX
• How to set UX Goals for a product or project
• How to decide which tool or methodology to use at what point in product lifecycle

This book takes UX acceptance as a point of departure, and builds on it with actionable steps and case studies to develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products. This is a must-have book for your complete UX library.

• Uses strategic models that focus product design and development
• Teaches how to decipher what tool or methodology is right for a given moment, project, or a specific team
• Presents tactics on how to understand how to connect the dots between tools, data, and design
• Provides actionable steps and case studies that help users develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development, and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products
• Case studies in each chapter to aid learning

Chapter 1

What is User Experience?

Abstract

This chapter discusses the field of usability and UX, its background and its history. Definitions are included. A case study on the first Kodak camera demonstrates a successful UX (and usability). Discussion of the field includes its growth through professional organizations.

Keywords

Human factors

Design

User experience

Usability

Technology

Strategy

Men have become tools of their tools.

Henry David Thoreau

Usable Technology Can Change the World

Properly designed technology that is centered on the user experience (UX) can make a positive difference in many domains. For example, a medical device that is easy to use can save lives. Voting machines that help a citizen easily and securely vote for the candidate of their choice secures the freedoms of an entire nation. Financial systems that guide people to make appropriate choices with their money can affect a family’s future. An accessible cell phone connecting a small village in a remote developing country to the Internet can change the world for its inhabitants.

Usability is a system in and of itself. A system is usable when it provides a service and is of use to a person. User-centered design produces technology that makes life better, that puts useful tools in people’s hands and that helps them reach their potential through a successful UX.

UX Story: The Kodak Camera

The Kodak camera is good example of powerful system usability, because it was a product that provided an excellent UX. Kodak enabled the average person to do what only skilled artists and technicians could previously do: produce images of the world around him.

Prior to the introduction of the first Kodak camera, the idea of an unskilled person using the complicated technology of photography to capture and share pictures with family and friends was impossible. The power of capturing a photograph was left to the experts, who were the technologists comfortable with the bulky and complicated equipment of the time. A nonspecialist had no hope of ever capturing an artistically composed picture.

George Eastman, the inventor of the Kodak camera, understood the power of developing products with user satisfaction at the forefront. The evolution of photographic technology, from something only experts could fathom to snapshot photos that anyone could create, developed historically into an iterative process of incremental improvements with the user fully in control of the process. Although Eastman had probably not heard of the term UX, he used many of the relevant principles to invent the Kodak camera; he put photography within the reach of those who could spend the money to buy the product. This focus was clearly demonstrated in his marketing line “You push the button, we do the rest.”

During the height of the industrial revolution, Eastman, a prolific inventor, created a series of innovations that led to the development of the Kodak camera in 1888; the product that introduced snapshot photography to the world. Until then, a photographer needed to use a large wet glass plate to capture a picture with ready access to a darkroom where he or she could coat the glass with photosensitive emulsion; when this glass plate was hit with light an image would imprint on the plate. After the image was exposed on the plate, it was developed, creating a glass negative, which in turn was used to print the picture. The camera had to be light tight. The plates were bulky (8″ × 10″) and the darkroom had to be large enough to fit them. If a photographer wanted to take landscape photographs, he or she had to take a horse and large cart with them into the field. The equipment was expensive and cumbersome and the subjects had to hold still for a long period of time.

The Kodak camera introduced a major change in the process of taking photographs through Eastman’s many patents. He started by breaking down the problem into smaller steps and one by one worked to solve them. The first was to solve the problem of having to use wet plates and so he came up with dry film. Eastman worked methodically to solve further problems related to the difficult technology by next inventing flexible roll film and, subsequently, the mechanism for rolling the film through a camera. Finally he put it all together by introducing the complete Kodak camera (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Kodak’s original patent.

The Kodak camera was sold preloaded with 100 pictures, in the form of an unexposed roll of film inside. Once the consumers had shot all the pictures, they sent the camera back to Kodak for processing. The camera was reloaded and returned to the consumer with the developed pack of pictures. The dark room, long poses, and heavy equipment became a thing of the past for the new consumer.

The effect snapshot photography had on the world was enormous. People could now see pictures of relatives they had never met, places they had never visited, and major world events like wars and natural disasters, that they had no need to witness in person. Such strong images exposed people to ideas and realities that had not been experienced before and created new kinds of thinking. For example, if people saw pictures of a war, they might reconsider their opinion of that war, or if they saw pictures of a natural disaster, they might be more inclined to donate time or money to alleviate the suffering caused by it.

After the first Kodak camera came a low-cost version: the Kodak Brownie camera. The Brownie camera introduced the idea of a snapshot, which was a picture that people could capture, almost in a snap. The Brownie was developed as a result of several inventions and evolutions in imaging technologies that, combined, created a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts, and offered a new experience to those who bought it. These incremental inventions included:

■ Dry film;

■ Flexible thin film and rolls of film;

■ A mechanism to roll film through a box camera;

■ Manufacturing plant to mass produce cameras.

Kodak brought a complicated technology to a simpler level, allowing novices to use it easily. The Brownie camera made the complicated process of photography more accessible to the nontechnical user, which broke down the barrier to entry into photography. After that, anyone could use the Kodak Brownie camera, through the simple UX that Eastman provided. This, in effect, is a user-centered design process that changed the world. The Brownie camera created new ways for people to communicate and interact; laying the groundwork for the social media sharing that goes on today (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Kodak Brownie camera.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

You Push the Button; We Do the Rest

Kodak’s easy, simple product introduced the world to the field of snapshot photography and helped pave the way for other imaging inventions such as motion pictures and, eventually, medical imaging. A lot has happened since the invention of the Kodak camera. New technologies include digital cameras, the Internet with email, text messaging, instant photo sharing, as well as the many applications on our mobile devices.

People now have the ability to connect with others and get information in ways never seen before now. People often interact with their devices more then with other people. It is not enough any longer to develop products and services that demonstrate amazing technical feats and functions. With these new inventions, UX has acquired new meaning. Product and system developers need to develop strategies that include the direction new products and services will take, and use them to make the world closer and shore up connections with other people. Some products and services declare that their goal is to connect people; while it is obvious that with profit as a bottom line the priority is not on personal human needs.

UX strategy could be the key to unlock technology’s potential to improve the world, but only if it truly can put the person at the center.

Usability and User Experience

Usability refers to the ease-of-use of a human-made object, digital or physical, or a combination of both. It is a part of the UX and is really the extent to which a person can use the object. A general definition of usability can be found in the Merriam Webster online dictionary:

“Usable:

1. Capable of being used

2. Convenient and practicable for use”

Usability is often seen as a subset of the UX. In many ways, that is true, since a key factor in a positive and successful UX is that the system is usable. However, the field has evolved in such a way that usability has also come to include the holistic experience of the user. These are intertwined and should be thought of together. Usability inspection methods are tools for the practitioner to evaluate the usability of a system. Usability itself is the all-inclusive environment and experience within which the user...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Case Studies
• Chapter 1: What is User Experience?
• Chapter 2: Design Thinking
• Chapter 3: UX Thinking
• Chapter 4: The Strategic Model
• Chapter 5: Beyond Mobile, Device Agnostic UX
• Chapter 6: Usability Inspection Methods
• Chapter 7: Usability Testing
• Chapter 8: Iterating on the Design
• Chapter 9: Moving Past the Lab
• Chapter 10: Global UX and Online Studies
• Chapter 11: Surveys, Web Analytics, and Social Media
• Chapter 12: Service Design
• Chapter 13: Getting Buy In
• Chapter 14: Success Stories
• Chapter 15: A Few Words About Failure: Turning It into Success
• Chapter 16: Big Picture Takeaways
• Glossary
• Index