A Project Guide to UX Design
by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
Somewhere there’s a student in user experience design losing sleep because he doesn’t know what it will be like to work on a real project at his new company. Across town, there’s a visual designer with plenty of project experience who yearns to take on new responsibilities in defining her site’s user experience. These are two people at different points in their lives but with a similar need: to understand how to integrate user experience practices within the context of a living, breathing project.
Goals
Our goal with this book is to give you the basic tools and context that will help you use UX tools and techniques with working teams. As you’ll see in many of these chapters, we’re not trying to be everything to all people, but we’re trying to provide you with the core information and knowledge that you should have to perform many of the duties you’ll be assigned as a UX designer. Beyond our own examples, we provide you with examples that help you identify ways to jumpstart the basic materials and allow you to mash up the information and create something newer, better, or even more suited to your own purposes. We hope we’ve done a decent job of articulating that this is a pretty good approach to UX design projects. We’re nothing if not constantly trying to learn and improve (whatever we do) with each iteration. That’s why, to a degree, we’re in this field.
UX Design
User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. We show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.
What You Will Learn
- Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
- Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
- Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
- Conduct user research and document your findings
- Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
- Design and prototype your application or site
- Make your product findable with search engine optimization
- Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance