UI&UX

Ui = User Interface

Ux = User Experience

Where did UI/UX Come from:

We watched a video on Norman doors, which are badly designed push and pull doors which don’t tell you how to open it, so you feel at fault, often times these doors are designed to be aesthetically pleasing rather than give a good UI/UX

Book to read: The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

“Human-centered design is a designphilosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet.” - Don Norman, The design of everyday things.

Principles of human centred design

1. Focus upon the people - who am I building this for? only when we understand the needs of a user, then we can make a design that the user will want to use, people don’t use an app because it looks nice, they use it to achieve their task, Who cares how amazon looks I want to buy multiple cut outs of Danny DeVito. This is where the user’s mental model comes into place shown here, sometimes we assume what people need without asking what they need, so were making our design decisions without asking, so we are assuming rather that doing.

A good way of going about this is by watching the user doing tasks for the product your designing for them, this is called contextual inquiry

You get a better understanding of their process, you understand their needs and goals for the process as well as identifying issues in their process that could be improved by a new design

2. Find the right problem - Most of the time the problem that needs to be fixed isn't the root cause, we also have to fix the symptoms. A good way to go about this is the 5 Why's? system

3. Think of everything as a system - not every problem exists on it’s own, by understanding and mapping out the extent of a system the problem is occurring in you can see how a potential solution could affect other parts of the system for better or worse or identify a cause of the problem that sits outside the known system

4. Always validate your design decisions - designers will often ask the client what design they like best, but this is not the best approach, it focuses the clients viewpoint on the look rather than their actual needs. a better method is to watch users attempt to use the prototype design and perform their tasks, only when you can see they can do a task you will know your design works, this is called Usability testing

Design Thinking Frameworks