User Experience Masterclass 101 with Mark Swaine

1. User Experience Week – Round Up Notes 2013
Mark Swaine (UX Nerd)
Twitter: @UX_UI_Guy
Email: mark@uxguy.com
Web: markswaine.com

2. What is User Experience?
“User experience design as a discipline is concerned with all
the elements that together make up that interface, including
layout, visual design, text, brand, sound and interaction. It
works to coordinate these elements to allow for the best
possible interaction by users.”
Don Norman

3. What is User Experience?
“A poor user experience can lead to feelings of confusion,
frustration and even anger. Naturally people will associate
such emotions with the product or service that left them
feeling that way and that will influence their lasting
impression. ”
Don Norman

4. What is User Experience?
“Users will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou

5. Speed – Can you keep up?
Speed of industry
User fatigue
Context
Emphasis on UX
Apocalypse of devices
Were only getting started
Up skill

6. Keep Up
Encourage side projects for staff
Encourage personal projects, whatever staff members love doing,
get them building…
Set a task every month for them to build something new
Organize hackathons
Educate, educate, educate, educate…

7. Wearable's
Geo location
More human
Daily lifestyles
Sound
Users expectations
Invisible ux

8. Know Thy User
Main users are ‘experienced’, ‘expert’, ‘novice’, ‘power users’ or
mainstream users…
The more fluid and responsive the the user experience is, the more
emotionally invested the user will become
Keep interactions natural
Ask only for limited input from users (give back reward)
Hide technology from the user
Exceed users lowest common expectations (If a user touches a wrong
touch point – give them something back)

9. Know Thy User
Users are not stupid – design for the lowest common denominator of
educated users
Be concise – do each element of the experience better than anyone has
ever done it before
Create emotional connections to brands
Create and leave the user with take away narrative after using the app
or website.

10. Know Thy User
Build healthy long term relationships with your users
Your app should know it’s mainstream users (users can ask why doesn’t
my brand / app know me?)
Build users trust in steps incrementally and look for soft commitments
along the way
To many input forms, stop exhausting users
Users want novelty

11. Stakeholders
Why is the product being made?
Who is it being made for?
Who are the affected stakeholders?
What are the stakeholders goals for the project?
How does it fit in with the wider business objectives?
Who are the competitors?
How is success going to be measured?

12. Rapid Prototyping
Pop
App Cooker
Easel
Just In Mind
Axure
UXPin
Omnigraffle
Briefs (works in xCode environment)

13. Rapid Prototyping
Livewires
Blueprint
Fluid
Balsmiq
Divshot
Mockability
Moqups
Proto.io

14. Participatory Sketching

15. Test & Iterate Quickly
“You can achieve a big vision – but in small increments. It
requires a commitment to iteration.”
Eric Ries

16. User Research
Contextual research
Competitor Analysis
In-depth interviews
Visual Style
Social analytics
Focus Groups
Online interviews
Existing Users
Analytics / tracking
On Location
Street interviews
Third Party Studies
Usability Review
Card Sorting

17. Creating Personas
User Background:
Age range, native language, physical and or cognitive limitations
Experience:
How familiar are your users with similar systems? Will they need to
learn?
Behavior:
What motivates users. Do they share any behavioral traits?
Desires and Concerns:
What do they want to achieve, what concerns do they have?

18. Psychology
How it feels to use is the ultimate measure of whether if something is simple
or not
Designers must try to predict how how a user will interact with their design.
We can achieve this through a mixture of gut feeling and experience
A good understanding of the interplay between mental models
and interfaces
Humans are complicated
Creating a strong emotional effective design can have dramatic results:
2 Advanced: http://v5.2a-archive.com/
Porsche 911 Microsite: http://www.porsche.com/microsite/911/usa.aspx

19. Psychology
Use the famous 5 second test: - Gives the user 5 seconds to identify the
key focus of any page of your app or website
Providing a delightful or exciting experience can extend the life and
success of your product
Good usability prevents feelings of annoyance
Users view a page of your product to gather information and process it
before making a decision – (typical human behavior – avoid and cause
less thinking per page)
Decrease cognitive load as much as possible, (Drop out rates relate to
over thinking and understanding of a page – to much cognitive load)

20. Psychology
A successful app or website will match the users mental model of how
they perceive it should work
Our digital products, wearable's, site and apps should really behave like
we do to create absolute association
Humans build there own mental models of what they know already –
we should put ourselves in the shoes of the user and predict what they
know and will do with our product.

21. Psychology
Recent Case Study
Socking Behavior
http://sockingbehaviour.com
Better Examples:
http://www.indochino.com/
http://skinnyties.com/
http://www.unitedpixelworkers.com/

22. Angry User Experience
The Login Page – it’s still a problem…
Users use a login form up to 15 times a day
82% of users on Yahoo forget their username and password
Login details are the No.1 helpdesk issue for online assistance – up to 90%
Mobile Login
Masking username & password on login fields – (show detail – takes too
much time for user looking up and down from keyboard
Get rid of auto capitalization, turn off autocorrect, avoid errors after hitting
submit - give errors beforehand…

23. Angry User Experience
Culprit – LinkedIn
When you try to link in with a user on mobile it takes you to a browser to
login with no help if you forget your username or password…. Users just
don’t bother….

24. Simplicity
Simplicity is an experience, it is extreme usability
How it feels to use is the ultimate measure of whether if something is
simple or not
Focus on the details such as, making it better, focus on user goals and
added value like micro interactions
Stop allowing people to feel stupid when they make mistakes using your
product, its not their fault
Stop slowing the user down, making them think, fill out forms, pointing /
tapping, homing, assessing, keying data and waiting for system
responses…

25. Simplicity
Rules for remove – features that add steps unneeded for fine control
multiple ways of doing the same thing, features that are responsible for a
lot of users, unnecessary options and preferences, visual clutter, details
and distract
Organize content right – what are the patterns of what years already
expect in their head from daily usage and life understanding the patterns
in people heads
If its color coded, then uses will have to learn that – too much work for
users
Don’t force users to learn more than they have to

26. Best Practice Summary
Make it feel snappier – always go back to engineering
Fewer m points – mental assessing
Reduce chances for users to make mistakes
Stop making people passengers and more partners of the user
experience
Stop commanding users what to do
Reduce everything thoughtfully

27. Onboarding
Onboarding for apps & websites….
Customer / enterprise level apps:
Help users learn how to use the app on first time launch
Use – on boarding design approaches, such as, on board screens, ‘Coach
Marks’…

28. Books
Jakob Nielsen
Mobile Usability
Jeff Gothelf
Lean UX
Leah Buley
User Experience of One
Jesse James Garrett
The Elements of User
Experience

29. Books
Luke Wroblewski
Web Form Design
Dan Saffer
Microinteractions

30. People to Follow
Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering:
http://www.uie.com/about/consultants/
Luke Wroblewski:
http://www.lukew.com/about/
Jesse James Garrett:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/about/team/jesse-james-garrett/
Dan Saffer:
http://www.odannyboy.com/

31. Focus On Outcomes Not Deliverables
Real people use your products and services, real people with different
wants, needs, abilities, environments and a million other possible
variables that need to be factored in…
“Businesses cannot treat their customers as passive consumers any
longer, every company is in the user experience business”
“If you take the time to understand how people think, then design
solutions around their true needs and behavior – your design will be far
more likely to perform better with them.”
http://alistapart.com/column/explaining-water-to-fish

32. Contact
Twitter: @UX_UI_Guy
Email: mark@uxguy.com
Web: markswaine.com