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[SIDE CONVERSATION]
Folks, we're going to go ahead and get started now.
I'd like to welcome all of you to today's presentation
brought to you by the User Experience
Professional's Association entitled
An Introduction to User Experience Fundamentals.
We will offer you several times during the presentation when
Chris will address questions.
If you have a question, please type it into the chat window.
And we will address it at the natural breaks
in the presentation.
I'd like to introduce Chris LaRoche,
an at large member of the User Experience Professionals Board
of Directors, as well as a usability consultant
and adjunct faculty members at both the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Northeastern U.
And right now, I would like to bring on Chris.
Hello, thank you very much.
This is Chris LaRoche.
I'm just going to bring up my slides here.
And we can get started with this presentation.
I just want to make sure before we go,
can everybody hear me OK?
Is everything OK?
I assume.
That's not exactly-- can everyone hear me?
OK, great.
Well, welcome to the seminar.
My name is Chris LaRoche, as [INAUDIBLE] nicely introduced
me.
And this is really an introduction
to User Experience fundamentals today.
And it's kind of a high level overview.
And this is a topic I'm particularly interested in.
I just want to give a quick overview of what
we're going to talk about today.
And I want to break it up into chunks
so we can have questions between each section
as was mentioned earlier.
The first and biggest part will be
talking about what is User Experience,
and trying to define it in a way that's
actually useful most of us.
And I want going to talk about some of the methods
we use in the User Experience.
Then I really want to talk about context
and the term "It Depends," which I'm sure most of us have heard.
But it really is so relevant, especially
as we go from usability to the User Experience.
Then I want to talk a little bit about design,
seeing where does design fit in this overall process?
Talk about the future, I'm not really
good at predicting things.
But I do think there's some serious and very clear
things for the future of our profession.
Then I have a quick bibliography on just some really great,
basic books and websites to look at.
As Elissa gave the nice introduction,
my name is Chris LaRoche.
I've worked in the tech field for about 20 years,
but eight years as a full time UX person,
and about 15 years as a part time UX person.
I work mostly software companies.
And throughout my career, I teach adjunct at night.
So I have kind of an interesting view
between being the partition who works in the stuff day to day
and then teaches it at night.
So hopefully I'll be able to give some useful information,
or at the very least, prompt lots of questions.
What is User Experience?
I know we all have probably talked
about this over various conferences or meetings.
But it's a really interesting term
that kind of isn't easily defined.
So what we have here, I would like
to do is just here's some of the various terms you probably
heard that reference or are somewhat similar to User
Experience.
I tend to call it the alphabet super of UX.
All these terms are somewhat accurate.
And in some ways, they also don't fully
comprehend what the true experience of User Experience
is.
So the way that I kind of started off in saying
is User Experience really is a very fluid term.
It's also very much an umbrella terms
that encompasses all these different fields.
One of the things that's been very interesting to me
over the last few years is the term usability
used to be the umbrella term.
And that has really kind of changed.
And the term User Experience is now
more of the common parlance, and the common wording
that is used.
That's for a variety of reasons.
It's kind of understandable across many industries.
I think one of the really important reasons that it's
become much more used is it really
speaks to the business community in many ways
that usability did not.
It also works in talking about-- people in management
understand that.
Even though they might not fully understand it,
it's a term they have heard and the have used.
I also think it's one of the interesting things is,
as I saying, the term usability was much more of a common word
used until recently.
And even like, for example, the organization
UXPA that we're a part of, it used
to be the Usability Professions--
Association, known as the UP.
And a large part of that was just
kind of, just a natural reaction as the term User Experience
became not only more common, but was also
a much more inclusive term, which does
dove tail into my next slide, which is this.
This is actually an interesting chart
created by a former president of UPA, Whitney Quesenbery.
And it really kind of tries to describe
what encompasses User Experience.
And on the outer side, you have these various different fields
that range from computer science, to various marketing,
to tech comm training, library science, anthropology,
and psychology, which are all fields within their own right.
A lot of parts of those fields now kind of encompass
or are under the UX umbrella.
And you can see in the inner circle, some of the things
or the terms that we might more use
as UX professionals, experience design, interaction design, web
design, user research.
And it all kind of comes together.
Again, this is kind of playing to the whole idea
of the umbrella term.
And also the other thing that I think
is probably our biggest strength is
we are very interdisciplinary.
We take from many different fields.
And that's a real strength.
One of the downsides of that, unfortunately,
is that it's very difficult to come up
with a definition that's very clear and straightforward
because we are so disciplinary.
When you say something such as one
is a developer, an engineer, a QA
person, or a technical communicator,
there's a common understanding of exactly what that is.
With User experience, it's just so broad,
and we're so new, that we're kind of really
still evolving that.
It's not a bad thing.
But it is kind of a little difficult.
In trying to define, I actually prefer
calling it the alphabet soup because I
think that's where we're at this stage in our profession.
The term usability and User Experience, or UX,
are often used interchangeably.
And they often mean the same thing sometimes,
although I'm seeing there is a slight variant that I've
described.
But often the terms are used interchangeably.
And also when you talk to UX professionals,
sometimes they might have very different,
their own personal definition of what User Experience is
between professionals, also between organizations.
Sometimes it means different things
in different organizations or in different industries.
One of the other things that's both kind
of a blessing and a curse right now
is that many people who aren't necessarily trained in any
of these fields, but are adding UX to their resume.
Because it's a very important thing,
it's getting a lot of traction now with resumes.
But they may not have an understanding
of what we would understand as a UX skill set.
So it's kind of, again, the interdisciplinary nature
and the rapidly expanding way in which our field is going,
is there's lots of people coming from the outside who just
might not have the same background
and might not have training in it.
What I really want to do is kind of just
give a little bit of a brief history,
but kind of try to define in some way that's
agreeable to almost everyone what exactly User Experience
is.
And, again, I might well use the term usability and User
Experience somewhat interchangeably,
though I do see a differentiation
with that today.
Usability and User Experience are
concepts that I think have been around for generations.
And in some ways, I think are from the very beginning
of time.
But the field as we know it now really evolves
from traditional human factors which was much more academic.
Field came out of World War Two.
But over the last few decades, the User Experience
and usability field has become much more standardized
and expanded tremendously.
I would say the concept, to me, of usability and User
Experience really is as old as human experience itself.
The idea of creating a wheel to move something from point A
to point B was really the first, in my mind,
usability that was done to make something more efficient.
I would also say think about the old rotary phone
we had in post-World War II in the '60s and '70s.
It was a rotary dial phone.
That was one of the first examples of solid usability
and how it kind of really expanded what people could do.
A more recent example would be the development
of the TV remote.
Although there's still a lot of confusion,
there is almost a common understanding
of when you pick up a remote, you press the power button.
And there is both form and function on that.
So it's still not a universal remote
that's really great for everybody,
that is a concept that really has
evolved over the last few decades.
Talking here about really how the field as we know it
kind of really expanded, was it actually happened in World War
II was a real move forward in the traditional human factors
because there was so much technology
that was expanding so rapidly during the war,
particularly airplanes.
There was tremendous amount of information.
They were adding more and more to the cockpit,
more information of how to review, more instrumentation.
And what happened was there was a tremendous amount
of accidents that spiked just because there was
so much information put there it wasn't thought out in a way
that people could actually look at six or seven things at once.
And they brought in the biological aspects
of human factors.
And they realized they have to actually map
a lot of this information to the way that people think,
because otherwise people get overwhelmed.
They don't do what they're supposed to do.
They try to do too much.
And it doesn't work.
So that was more in the academic world.
And then after the war, the last two decades,
software and computer hardware industries really
expanded the idea of usability.
The web explosion since the mid '90s
has just exponentially increased and really
made the User Experience such a predominant thing
the last few years.
Another thing in the last years really
is the idea of consumer devices, and consumer products.
It's become much more of a requirements for consumer
devices to be discoverable, and people
just to pick them up and use them.
The website of Amazon or Apple are just
one of the more obvious examples.
But simply put, people won't buy devices
they want to use for their own consumption that require
a tremendous amount of documentation or training.
People just won't put up with it anymore.
Companies have realized that.
I would say User Experience the next immediate future really
is going to begin medical devices and medical issues.
Not only with electronic health records,
but dealing with an older population that
needs to have things that are much more accessible.
It also has to be things that people can kind of discover
and use on their own.
And there's also a tremendous amount of money
to be made in that.
But it also needs to be cost savings in health care.
So all these things are coming together
to work with medical devices over the next decade or so.
I quickly mentioned it, but human factors
really comes from the field of psychology,
and focuses really on the understanding
of biological human traits, and mapping that to human's needs,
and just how much can our brain take at once,
how much information can we take in, and then bring back.
And that was really kind of the baseline of understanding
so much of what the psychology aspect
that we do in usability and User Experience.
Really, the growth of information technology
and the internet, particularly the last 25 years
really has made UX a critical aspect of both product
and service design.
Again, I want to reiterate, usability really
is at its most base level trying to understand
how users can form a task in the most efficient and stress
free manner are possible.
And one of the things about human factors
that I kind of use as an analogy that not everybody might agree
with, but think about our brain, in a way, as a hard drive.
It's always trying to get as much information
in the most efficient way possible.
It also has a capacity issue.
And there's a lot of debate now whether our brain, because
of the amount of information thrown at us the last 20 years,
is are we actually reaching capacity
and our brain is trying harder and harder
to be much more efficient and maximize
what's coming in and taking out?
And we just have to be careful because sometimes if we're
overloaded, it's a mechanical thing.
And our brains just can't process much more
in a certain amount of time.
And I kind of talked around this a little bit.
But really as the field of usability matured,
it evolved in the field of User Experience which really, I
would say would focus much more on the full end
to end experience for the user, not just the user interaction
with the user interface.
And this example of this, I would say, at my job
the last few years we've had to do
lots of usability evaluation of various interface,
both software and website.
And many times we come up with, and we look at it.
And they say, can you test the interface?
And we do.
And according to whatever evolving standards there are,
the user interface is clean and straightforward.
But the overall process, and how people
have to complete something and maybe go to two or three
different screens, and potentially two or three
different programs, the process and workflow is very confusing.
And that would be the full User Experience.
But the interaction in the UI itself is perfectly fine.
So it might be usable in a very small, narrow way.
But the overall User Experience can
be very confusing for people.
And that's one of the things I think
that's really wonderful about the idea of User Experience,
is it really is a much more encompassing
and overarching concept and topic.
One of the outgrowth of really early human factors
and early usability work was the idea
of User-Centered Design I'm sure many of you
might be familiar with it.
What that really is, overall, is User-Centered Design
is a framework and a method to create products that really
correctly match a user's needs and expectations.
If you do have products that are created
using UCD principles in the methodology,
it's much more likely to be successful
since a user's needs are considered, and hopefully
incorporated throughout the initial and development
planning stages.
UCD really does not guarantee a great product.
But you have a much better rate of actually
having a product that's successful
and maps the user's needs because you
are involved in the user from the very early process.
One of the main topics and thrusts of User-Centered Design
is no thy user, no thy user, no thy user.
This cannot be emphasized enough.
And you really have to have continuous, direct,
and ongoing, even though continuous and ongoing are
somewhat repetitive, you really have
to have the user involved at various stages throughout this
just to understand what their mental model is,
and how they really want to be able to work with the product.
As a former technical writer, the thing this next quote
really kind of has come home to me very much.
It is, the key to making things understandable
is to understand what it's like not to understand.
And that's from Richard Saul Wurman,
who actually coined the term information
architecture in the late '70s.
He was also the founder of the Ted Talks.
And really what this is is a combination of having empathy
for users is a key component of all User-Centered Design
and UX.
But the key to making things understandable
is really to step back and understand
what it's like to not know a product, or some process.
Part of the problem with humans is, as human beings,
once we learn something we kind of put that in our brain
think that's common knowledge, and assume that people will
know exactly that information you now know,
which is not true.
One of the things I would say as examples of this,
back to the TV remote.
When you first pick up a TV remote,
most people just look for the Power button, and then
the Channel or Volume.
But, unfortunately, it's getting better.
But it's still not consistent.
You have to spend some time working
with that to understand.
And then after you learn the various things you can do,
whether you're DVRing, or TiVoing, or anything
like that, then it becomes second nature.
I'd say another example for people
that use public transportation systems is the first time you
go into a public transportation system,
if you've never been there before, you have to understand,
do I need a card or a ticket?
Do I buy a ticket that goes for a flat fee?
Is it cost according to time?
Is it cost according to how far I go?
Ands so you learn all that.
And then after you've done that several times,
you become quite knowledgeable about that.
You don't even think about that really.
But that's really one of the crux of what Wurman's saying,
is you kind of have to step back and think about things that you
already know.
And I can honestly say in all my years
in the UX field, that was one of the more difficult things
to do because it's very difficult to unlearn
and understand what it's like to not know something.
But that's really one of the key tenants
of User-Centered Design.
Here's just a list of the benefits
of User-Centered Design.
And this is a long list.
And it's certainly not comprehensive.
But really, I'd say, for me, key components to this
are the ease of learning, the learnability of products.
Is it efficient?
And the discoverability of products,
really, how easy is it to take it and learn it?
How easy is it to relearn it?
Is it made so that if I do make an error
it's not going to cost me a tremendous amount of data loss
or anything like that.
It is also, really, you want to have
a certain satisfaction and likeability.
If it's a work product, you don't necessarily
want to love it.
But you want to be able to complete your task
and feel like you've done it in the most efficient way possible
and move on to something else.
One of the important things about User-Centered Design
is really to understand what User-Centered Design is not.
And what it is not, is that users are not designers.
And designers are not users.
The example I have here is called the Homer.
I'm not sure if anyone has ever seen this before.
But what it is, it's from season two of "The Simpsons."
And Homer Simpson had a long lost brother
who owned a very successful company.
And he came and found Homer, and though, I
need to have an average guy come and tell me
what the average person wants in a car.
And so Homer, being Homer, had all these great ideas.
And was very happy to give all the suggestions.
So what they did is they came up with this car called the Homer.
Unfortunately, it was incredibly expensive to manufacture.
And what ended up happening is, an example
of what this car had was it had two bubbles
so that the people in the front and the people in the back
were completely separated because Homer
wanted the children in the back.
It had a very loud engine, which is very expensive as well.
It has three horns.
And it had huge cupholders all around it
because Homer wanted cupholders everywhere.
The end result was the car ended up bankrupting the company,
and the brother went way.
The other thing that's really important about this
is to say this is really an example of when User-Centered
Design, you do not take exactly what users said verbatim,
or particularly one or two users,
and build and make that design.
You have to get a lot of feedback
from a lot of different users, understand
the different groups who are your users.
And then you come up with our concepts for design.
But doing design verbatim according to what XYZ user said
is often quite unsuccessful.
The irony of all this, though, is
when this came out in the early '90s, this episode,
it looked ridiculous.
But some of the things are actually
quite common in cars today.
You think of a cup holder, I think
almost every car in North America
today is now made has made has cupholders, at leas two,
if not four or six.
The other thing that's interesting,
too, is the bubble domes, the separation of the children.
You think about a lot of cards, especially bigger ones,
the back seat will now have a separate TV, or tablet,
or something so people can watch TV
if they're in the back, kind of be separated
from the people in the front, which sounded kind of odd
at this time 20 years ago, but now is standard.
So it's really interesting.
I guess the takeaway from this also
is to realize User-Centered Design is important.
But you also have to understand when good is good enough.
And sometimes it doesn't have to be perfect,
but it has to be good.
So I've talked a lot in the last few minutes about what exactly
User Experience is.
I haven't given a solid one line definition
because I don't necessarily think
that is an accurate reflection of how the field of the term
is.
We're continuing to grow.
And it's rapidly expanding.
And it's evolving.
I think the term the way that I would describe it today
is very different than I would have described
it a couple years ago, and quite possibly be
very different than we'll describe it
two years from now because it's so evolving.
The one thing I do think that we're
going to talk about a little bit more as we go on in the session
is I do group User experience.
Three distinct groupings, which are research, design,
and evaluation.
We're going to talk quite a bit about that
over the next few sections.
But for now, I just wanted to stop.
And if anyone has questions, I'll
be happy to take it on what we talked about so far.
Chris, at the moment we do not have any questions.
For those of you who are attending the webinar,
if you have a question, please enter your question
into the chat window.
And we'll address them at the end of the next section.
OK, thank you, so I'm going to go on to methods.
And methods really are kind of the core
of the field in so many ways.
There are a tremendous amount of methods
that are available to obtain information
from users about their behaviors, their goals.
And one of the things I think the most strong point
of our field is, I mentioned the interdisciplinary nature of it,
and part of the thing with that is the methods that we use,
a lot of them are adaptations of what other fields used that we
use for UX, which I think is amazing.
It also leads for us to increase and add to our methods toolkit.
When the profession started emerging in the late '70s
and '80s, the main method that most people knew,
or the only method we really had in a lot of ways,
was usability testing.
Usability testing of a product, usually when
it was close to release, proved quite successful
as a way to understand the user's
perspective in the product.
And it made our profession visible.
Unfortunately, doing testing and not doing anything else before,
if there were critical issues that
came up right near the end, that tended
to be very cost-prohibitive, and also particularly dangerous
if it was a particular application, if it was one's
life depended on it, or it was fiscal, or anything like that.
The thing that is really amazing to me
is we have really evolved from just usability testing
to a whole plethora of various methods that we have today.
And on here-- and, again, to tie this
into what it was mentioning before, I think
with these methods-- I mean, we have research.
In my mind, research is really understanding
what the user's needs are, and their goals, and behavior.
And, optimally, that's earlier in the process.
Design is creating and designing the interface or the experience
the user expects or needs.
The evaluation is once the interface or product
is in some type of working state, users can work with it,
and test, and evaluate the interface or product or service
maps to their own mental model, and their needs
and expectations.
And, again, evaluation was where usability testing fits in.
And that was all we had until recently.
But now we have so many different methods
that it actually makes the field very exciting for me,
personally.
There are many, many other methods.
These are probably the most common ones.
And in the research bucket, I would
say we have user observations, and some
might call ethnographic studies.
A lot of this comes from the ethnographic anthropology
field.
Anthropologists might not necessarily
agree the way that we use it is the proper way.
But we've adapted it for the needs of the User Experience
professional.
Card sorting, and just sorting through information,
is very, very common.
There's lots of great online options to do that now.
Surveys have been around forever.
But we actually, in the field, it's one of the best methods
we use as user researchers just to get information
at various stages in a process or in a product's life cycle
to understand users likes, dislikes,
what they would like changed.
Focus groups are really important.
They've actually been adapted for marketing research.
We use them in a very different way.
But focus groups are a good way to get high level information
early in a process when you're trying
to help build requirements and things like that.
User interviews are another way to talk to people one on one
or also in a group situation.
Personally, where we work now, user interviews
are one of the primary methods to be
used because you can have access to people.
It's a very casual way to get lots of information
from people in kind of an unfettered way.
And it's a little bit less sterile than the usability test
lab.
One thing in design is prototyping.
And in my mind, I use prototyping
as a very amorphous term from everything
from paper prototyping to almost a working release model.
Prototyping has a huge, huge variety
that can be used throughout an entire cycle.
Also storyboarding and brainstorming
are other ideas that help with creation, implementation
of a design.
In evaluation, we have usability testing,
which is still very important.
But now it's just one of many things that we do.
Usability testing has become the most mature of the methods
we use.
We can do moderated or unmoderated testing.
And you sometimes will have a moderator, sometimes you won't.
You also can do a lot of remote testing.
That's very common now.
And there's also in lab testing, which is still used,
particularly on companies that have the resources to be
able to have a lab of there own, or create
their own room in a lab.
Also other evaluation methods would be expert review,
where a usability expert will review a user
interface for just emerging standards.
A Heuristic Review is also still well-known.
It's one of the first things most people in the field
learn about.
It's an outgrowth of the Rolf Molich
and Jakob Nielsen's seminal work 20 plus years ago on the top 10
heuristics.
That's been modified.
You can create your own heuristics for your own needs
depending on your industry and product.
And also surveys are very important evaluations,
key satisfaction surveys, and how people view something
after it's been released.
The other thing about usability testing
that I would like to emphasize too,
is there's types of usability testing.
There's formative type testing, which is best used earlier
in the process to understand what a user's needs
and expectations are.
Then you also have something called
summative, which is later int he process
to understand performance and satisfaction that users
have with it.
There's also another type that we use.
It's called exploratory.
We're just trying to get general information.
And quite often, we do that after a product's
been released just to see what people's expectations are
of that product.
The listing in the previous slide
really is only a small sample of the most common methods.
And, again, as I said, there's many other methods available.
And I'm happy to talk about those
if anybody wants to after.
Also, like I said, due to the interdisciplinary nature
of the field, the amount and type
of methods that we have just keeps
on expanding just as we include more and more different fields
and realize some of the methods that these various fields have
used really are adaptable and useful within UX.
What I have here is a timeline I created for a presentation
here at work.
And this is more the traditional waterfall method
of product development, and not really the agile,
which I'll talk a little bit about in a minute.
But really what I was just trying
to do is map to some of our potential clients the times
we will use various methods, and the various groupings
during their development process.
And, again, this is the optimal way
in which the timeline would work.
The thing I want to say, the caveat,
is almost all the methods we talked about,
whatever grouping they're in, research, design,
and evaluation, they can be used at various times
at certain effectiveness.
It's all about the context.
But primarily, user research is optimally
done early in the process before you really start development.
Then after that, you can do early, low fidelity prototypes,
just paper prototyping, even sketching, things like that.
As development starts doing a little bit more
advanced prototyping then the design and UI design
really helps.
The once a set of some basic product is there,
you can do some evaluation of expert and heuristic reviews,
or heuristics first, then expert reviews later.
And then you can start with the traditional usability testing.
Again, this is optimal in a project
when you have a lot of time.
I totally understand most of us in the real world
don't get that kind of time.
And sometimes we're only let in certain times.
Or we have two many different projects
so we can only do a certain amount.
So you have to find out what your time frame is, what works,
and how you can help the most.
Again, as I said, most of these methods
are quite flexible to do at any time
during the development cycle.
And one of the things, like the classic case we have here,
is we'll have plans come to us a week or two before they're
releasing a product, and say, we want to do testing.
Quite often, it takes a while to do a proper in lab test.
We do a lot of in lab testing.
And we say, we just don't have the time to do that right now.
It's going to take us time.
So I say, why don't you just release.
And once the release happens, we set up a time.
We do a full usability test, do a report.
And then at that point, it's a little bit of pressure.
But if they do a patch release, or a .1 release,
they can take that information and incorporate that in.
It's not optimal.
But sometimes you have to be able to be very adaptable
and change that.
A little bit talking about agile,
that's a whole other topic in itself.
And due to the quick nature of agile,
quite often some of these various methods we talked about
can be used at different points.
I don't have much more to say about agile
because it's a topic in itself.
But more and more, particularly small,
software companies, and even the larger companies,
are starting to adapt aspects of agile.
It's really kind of taking various methods that work best.
And I find in this situation, a lot of the user research
methods that come, particularly observation,
as well as like very focused testings,
is often what happens in agile.
But, again, the nature of it is so flexible you can actually
adapt that to whatever your own needs are.
So that's what I have for methods.
And I'm happy to take any questions if anybody wants
to have any questions about methods at this point.
Chris, up to the moment, we do not have any questions.
Attendees, if you would like to add a question,
please post it to the chat window
that's available for you.
Why don't you go ahead.
OK, thank you, the next section is
kind of a bit of an ad hoc one that I wanted to add.
And I had a few people review it, and they chuckled
and all agreed it was important.
But it's one of the things that goes back to the Wurman thing
about what it's like to not understand, and just understand
the context of a particular situation scenario.
Part of the overall issue with understanding usability,
and particularly the User Experience,
is the impact of context on the user product or service.
And, really, this is really critical.
It needs to be understood within working with a product.
And so what that means is that trying
to make usability standardized, and User Experience
standardized, is very, very difficult
because, quite often-- we have had many, many clients here
and even in my previous job, come up and say,
is this usable?
And I have to always say, well, we have to talk to users.
I'm really not sure.
And it depends.
And usually that just frustrates people.
I don't like doing that, particularly clients.
But what I really have to say is it
all depends on the context of the product, the services,
the situation, the environment you're in.
For example, if you have a product that's really not
very usable, but you're going to be the first to market
and you really want to gain market share,
the context of that is, push the product out.
Get it out to market.
And then make changes once you have it out there
so you can build market share.
The flip side of that is if you have a product
and there's two other products that do almost exactly
the same thing, you need to have a differentiation there.
And with that, having a really solid end
to end User Experience is critical
because that's a differentiator.
So the context is that needs to be
a whole lot more usable than a product that doesn't exist
and you need to get it to market.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't make
your product as usable as possible.
But it's all about the context.
The other thing about context is the product you're working on,
do users have and extensive background or knowledge of it?
Are they subject matter experts?
Is there a tremendous amount to assume
before you go to a product?
So there might be ways that you have the user interface
designed so people will understand and know that, like,
for example, doctors, or opticians.
Will they understand a lot of the common terms
that a common person who's not trained that might not know?
So you wouldn't want to test that, or have people
who don't have a knowledge of that in testing because might
give you some false data on that.
The same point is you have a website that's
very common for everybody to use,
and you have a lot of different users,
you can't have the same level of expectation
of what people will know.
So it's all contextual, which makes it sometimes very
frustrating to say, this works, and this doesn't work.
Again, it all comes down to having
and understanding who your users are.
One of the things people might have heard the ISO standard,
which is a fairly famous organization.
This is an older version.
But they actually have an ISO standard 9241-11 for usability.
Again, this is a bit older.
There are newer ones since then.
But I really like this one because it really kind of gets
the crux of what it's saying in the section.
Really what it says is usability refers
to the extent to which a product can be used by specified users
to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency,
and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
So besides using specified a lot in this wording,
I think it really gets to the main point of everything
actually is very contextual.
And it's always specific to what are
the goals particular users are doing,
and who are these specific users?
And are they having a very narrow focused task?
So I think you really have to take that into account.
Really dovetailing with this is, it depends.
And many UX professionals you talk to, you'll ask them about,
is this usable?
What do you think of that?
Is that a good interaction?
Is that a bad interaction?
And you'll get, it depends.
So really what this gets back to is
what I was just mentioning earlier
about the contextual nature of it.
So, for example, you think about a particular product.
And think about the websites that you use quite often.
Is it usable?
Well, for one person or one group of persons,
it might be very usable.
For other people, it might not be usable.
And this is really just to understand
who the groupings are, who your user base is.
And do you have to make it usable for a variety of people?
So also part of the problem you have here is the issue
is sometimes you have research contradictions,
or you have contradictions in your testing.
This is a very common thing that I
think anybody who's done testing probably runs into
is you might have a website that's quite difficult.
And users are going through the tasks,
and quite often failing a good bit of them.
It's because the design isn't mapping to their needs.
So they'll go through, and users will struggle very much.
But at the end, you ask them the general ending questions.
Say your thoughts on the website.
Can you let us know what you thought of the product?
And they'll be like, oh, that was easy.
It's great.
So you have this weird thing where people are saying,
it's really easy.
But they failed most of the test.
And there's a few things there.
People don't want to admit they were wrong or couldn't
go through the thing, goes with the application and the test,
people want to please.
But actually did it work?
Well, it depends, because sometimes for a certain group
if it was a highly technical group, it might be easier.
And they might have understand those tasks, where
if it was a group of people who didn't really
have a background that they maybe needed to,
it didn't work.
So you have this real difficult time in understanding,
and not always-- and going back to the Homer,
what you don't really necessarily don't
want to take verbatim what people say,
you have to get a lot of data from a lot of different people,
and potentially different personas and groups of people,
and then use that.
And kind of amalgamate it together.
So I'm just going to stop here.
I was going to talk a little bit about design.
I just didn't know if there were any questions before we went on
about context and it depends.
I don't mean it to be frustrating
because it depends can be very frustrating if we
want an answer.
Thank you, Chris, so far we do not
have any questions, so, proceed.
OK, thank you, so I want to talk about design,
and where does design fir in the overall User Experience,
because it is a more recent phenomenon in the field,
but I think it's incredibly important.
First and foremost, I think I need
to say that I have done some design before.
I am not a very good designer.
Actually, I'm kind of a lousy designer.
I'm very good at UX methods, and the traditional research
and evaluation.
But design is a new frontier.
I would say, though, as the field of US has matured,
and we've gained more footholds throughout
various organizations, the importance of design
has also become critical to our UX profession.
This is for a lot of reasons.
I would say, really, I think as we
gain traction with the usability testing,
and user research becoming and understood to be important,
design's influence expanded.
And a lot of the design focused on there was traction here.
And they said, well, we're kind of part of that too.
And also think about of more forward thinking
UX people realized design is critical
to the overall components of the full User Experience, much more
the usability, going back to usability
is really focused on the UI, where User Experience is
the end to end experience.
And design is critical to that.
So I think, especially the last few years,
more and more companies are realizing that design really
is a critical component of the overall User Experience.
I think one of the things that really helps us,
if you kind of have those groupings that I mentioned
of research, design, and evaluation, it really allows
the User Experience professional or UX groups
to be involved with a product throughout the entire
development and the product life cycle.
And, obviously, not all of us can be involved end to end.
But it does give us a glimpse into the entire process, where
quite often we were only allowed into the very end
for doing evaluation, sometimes only
in the research at the very beginning.
Including all of those, and making design really
central to it, has really kind of helped
us with being involved in the product from end to end.
But really what it's also helped,
it's also brought in a lot of people
who are not traditional UX people who are designers who
are learning a lot of UX methods.
But they kind of fall under the umbrella of UX now.
And I rightly see design as being probably the biggest
grouping for the next few years within UX.
I think it's really a testament to the relevance,
the importance, the growth, of our field,
is because only a decade ago really a lot of companies,
the only part you would really be involved in if you were a UX
person before that term was ever used
would be involved in product evaluation,
mostly in usability testing.
One of the things that's really emerged in the last few years,
particularly for folks like me who don't have a design eye,
but actually have to do a lot of design work,
is the idea of design patterns.
And really what that is, is it started as online style guides.
And design patterns really are now become,
it's either an example.
Or they sometimes have full HTML or coding
of which is their interaction patterns
and standards you can use.
Some of these are free.
Some of these you have to buy.
But not only does it help make building
a full User Experience a little bit
easier because you can use a lot of the stuff,
it also makes it much more consistent
because if you have a pattern, if you have to actually
have a-- you want to force a yes or a no,
you can take that interaction, radio buttons, for example,
and just use that in every place where
you want to force a yes or no, or either or option.
So that's really quite good.
One of the other things I just wanted to mention,
too, was I talked a little bit about it,
was the whole idea of design and just doing design quickly.
And I led a team a few years ago.
And we had to redo the first experience of a product.
And we had a really difficult time because we had five of us.
And we had this crux that we had experienced users coming
to the site, and they needed to go
right to their already designed projects in a software
application.
But you also really wanted to expand the amount of people
who were knew and wanted to start to use the product.
So you had to have an experience that could really walk people
through, and be discoverable, and learnable.
One of things about design that we learned, and I've
learned over the years, is design, by its very nature,
is iterative.
You can't just say, OK, here's a design,
and then design it by committee in an afternoon
because you might come up with something.
But you're going to necessarily come up
with a design that works for the vast majority of the population
it means for it to work for.
So what we did is we spent about three months
and we went through 17 or 18 iterations of this.
And some were very complicated.
Some were very simple.
In the end, we had the five of us working through.
On the 18th design, we came up and agreed upon a design.
In the end, it was actually a very, very simple design.
And so, of course, we had people coming up to us,
and saying, that was simple.
That would have taken me a day.
And we're like, well, no, it didn't, because we
had all these requirements.
We had to sort through it.
We tested it along the way.
We tested it.
Changed it.
Tested it.
Changed it.
Talked to people in interviews, went back and forth.
So one of the things about design
is you really have to have the space and the ability
to do iterate design to go through it in all the time.
We don't always have that.
That's fully understandable.
But the optimalist strives for that.
And even if you have to get something out there,
even after it's released, you can go through
and do these iterate designs after it's released,
and try to see if it works, and make
it even better for the next time.
One of the great things I really want to talk about
is the usability body of knowledge.
The usability body of knowledge really
is a resource and a great repository for information
about a ton of UX methods, and also about
some basics of design.
This was a website created by the Usability Professional
Association back in the day.
The URL is usabilityBOK.org.
The content is updated over time.
And it's almost similar to very peer-reviewed.
It goes through a committee.
They agree upon it.
So it's a tremendous way to review resources
about UX methods and design information.
To me, the absolute best thing about this
is there's tons of links and citations in there.
So you go through that, you get a nice snippet
if you want to learn about a particular method,
or some design theory, or some design aspects.
But they also have links to articles, and other citations,
and books.
So you can actually get a really great repository
of what you really want to look at.
And it's kind of a real treasure trove
of going through a tremendous amount of information.
And I can't strongly recommend that enough.
Before I go to the future, are there any questions?
Chris, we still don't have any questions, thank you.
OK, so the future, I am actually a little hesitant
to predict the future because we don't know how it will be.
But I'm just basing on the past 10 years in the field.
I would say the future of UX is very, very bright.
UX is now an important concept and idea
in many, many products.
Products need to deliver more than just a good interface.
They need to deliver the end to end experience.
And the example that I actually use, and I know it's
commonly used.
But I think it's really interesting, is Zappos.
The idea of buying shoes for many people
is much more of a thing to do.
But Zappos made the experience so much more pleasant.
And they did a couple things that are really kind of played
into what people wanted.
They had free delivery, which is something
that is quite amenable to people.
They also had a free no return policy.
So if you want to send it back, no problem.
They had a very good website that was quite easy to use.
And they also kind of made it-- there
was a certain amount of fun factor involved
with it because you could choose a bunch,
compare, all that kind of stuff, which, I mean,
they could've just made it a very boring website.
But they kind of did that, added the delivery aspect of it,
and just made it very light-hearted.
And that really, really kind of worked with people.
And I think that's a very good example
of good usability versus a good experience.
Besides design, as the field of User Experience
is becoming more important, the idea
of being strategic in the emergence of a UX strategy
is really continuing.
And part of that is because now, in many of the more
progressive companies, there is a Chief Experience Officer,
or a person who's a Vice President of User Experience.
So you have all the people, such as me,
and probably many of you that have kind of been working
on a lot of this stuff for years.
And that was important.
But now we have management buy in at the top.
So we're have these two come together, which is great.
But we're also kind of the idea of a strategy for UX,
and how the overall experience for whatever customer or user
you have is really important.
And I think that just is really showing how far as the field
we've come.
I think it's very important to know that User Experience is
now expanding into industries that traditionally did not
view usability as a concern of theirs.
And it really shows how the field has evolved.
I mean, I chuckled a couple years ago
when I was watching TV one night.
There was an ad for Cadillac that came on.
And they mentioned once or twice the overall customer
experience.
And that is something you would have probably never heard
of until a few years ago.
I think as design becomes more a part of the overall User
Experience, are field itself becomes much bigger and more
valuable.
And I think having design within the UX umbrella
does make it so much bigger.
But it also makes a lot of us more traditional UX people kind
of rethink and really kind of push our boundaries,
thinking about beyond just the methods, and beyond
just the evaluations, thinking about the design,
and thinking about things as a much wider and more expensive
concept.
I truly do think the future for our field,
and for our job prospects are really, really
bright for the near future.
Most of the UX jobs I would say are located usually
around urban areas, or tech centers,
or places that have start up communities, or universities.
However, I must say I'm just stunned at the amount of jobs
that I see come past my desk in places
that I would never ever expect.
So I think it just shows how much the field
itself is expanding.
There's so many jobs available.
Just as a wrap-up, I want to say there's
a tremendous amount of content available about our field.
And there's a tremendous amount of books.
I just tried to get it down to a couple books
that I would suggest for people that are just
kind of new to the field, or really want
to get a good grasp.
I strongly suggest people read "The Design
of Everyday Things."
It's a book that was published about 30 years ago by Donald
Norma, who's really one of the founders.
He's a psychologist by training, an academic.
But he actually wrote a book just
to make people think about how usability, UX, kind of all
come together with psychology.
And last year, he updated his book for a revised and expanded
addition to make it a bit more up to date.
It's a great books.
It's the best $12 you'll ever spend.
When I read it, it kind of changed my world.
In my classes I teach on UX now, that's the first book
we read in the first week just because it really
makes people think about things in a very different way.
I would also strongly say, "User Experience Remastered"
is about two years old.
Chauncey Wilson, who was my mentor,
he's the editor for this book.
And it's actually a bunch of luminaries
in the field have chapters on their own expertise.
But it's a bunch of really great information
about a lot of the most common methods that we use,
as well as kind of funneling those into designs.
There's a tremendous amount of websites,
a couple that I would strongly recommend.
The first one is User Experience Magazine.
It's a publication of the UXPA International.
But it's a great magazine for people
that are new to the field and trying to just kind of start
in the first few years of the profession.
It really has lots of information
about career changing, career advice,
where and how to learn things, collaboration.
Boxes and Arrows and UX Matters are also
two other well known and very big
websites that have just a tremendous amount of articles
they update daily, or weekly sometimes.
You can get on a list to get notified on updates.
But both of them have a tremendous amount
of information.
And then I would also suggest the Journal of Usability
Studies, or it's also called JUS,
which is another UXPA publication.
And it's a peer-reviewed journal.
I would say it's somewhat academic.
But our field by its very nature is very practical.
But it is a peer-reviewed journal.
And it's a great way to get information, and kind
of retrospective information, about a lot
of different content methods, things like that,
that people who have been in the professions for a long time
have tried and used.
So I would strongly recommend those URLs.
I'm happy to take any questions now.
I just want to say I know this is being recorded.
But I also will post this on SlideShare later today.
And if anyone has any questions, I'm happy to take them.
As of right now, we still do not have any questions.
We'll wait a few minutes, and see
if we get any in the chat room now.
OK.
If you have a question, and you're one of the attendees,
please post your question to the chat window.
Chris, it appears that we do not have any more questions.
So I'm apt to take the presenter roll from you.
Oh, of course, OK.
We do have some upcoming webinars presented by the User
Experience Professional Association.
The next in the UX Fundamental Series
will be on human factors and user experience,
will expand on some of the topics
that Chris was talking about today about the history of User
Experience, and a lot more about how
human factors plays in our life.
And in the professional series, we
will be offering the usability testing
of mobile devices, which is a very specific topic that
has been requested by a number of our members.
I'd like to thank all of you for attending
the Introduction to UX Fundamentals.
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