In order to better identify and understand the structure, flow, and the attributes of the tasks our app must facilitate, we must establish requirements. Read On >>4 – Task Description
Author: Cormac Maher
3 – Personas
“Personas put a face on the user—a memorable, engaging, and actionable image that serves as a design target. They convey information about users to your product team in ways that other artifacts cannot.”
The Essential Persona Lifecycle – Your Guide to Building and Using Personas, Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt
Having already carried out our user survey, we were ready to create personas that were both assumption and data-based. Read On >>3 – Personas
2 – Research
Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviors and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment.
Jane Fulton Suri, creative director, IDEO – “Informing
Our Intuition: Design Research for Radical Innovation” – http://
bkaprt.com/jer/1/
Having chosen the audience engagement app as our project, we moved to the research stage. The purpose of this stage was to understand understand the needs of people for whom we were designing, the end users. The steps we would take were: Read On >>2 – Research
1 – Problem identification / Ideation
Human-Centered Design Project
Project Context, Background and Aim:
Identify a problem in an existing interface or choose an activity which has not yet been addressed by an app, website, etc. Carry out research to gain an understanding of the human and the tasks they need to perform. Based on this, design a paper prototype of an application, or part of an application, to better address the problem at hand.
1 – Bookmark Redesign
This project was a full user-centered design (UCD) research project.
The project was based on the poorer user experience smartphone users have bookmarking web pages, compared to the experience of users on desktop computers.
The author had created over a thousand bookmarks on his PC and Chromebook, but created very few on his smartphone.
Prior attempts to add and retrieve bookmarks using his mobile phone proved a poor user experience.
The decision to redesign the bookmarking process was based on a number of factors, including:
- The bookmarking redesign was a better match for the scope of the project.
- The prevalence of smartphone users who use their web browsers regularly, offered a much larger pool of research participants.
- Users are experienced at the process of bookmarking on personal computers, meaning user testing would require less induction.
