Notes and snippets from Marcin Treder
An interface was considered an addition to great technology, usability was less important.
Function was the main drive and success indicator.
(advanced)Features were seen to be more important over usability.
Users were suffering, and this was the rise of a new age of technology.
Fierce competition gave birth to a more vivid differentiation approach while technology became cheaper than ever.
Consumers were flooded with cognitive overload and had an extremely short attention span.
"great products create a great end-to-end experience: they shouldn’t be just usable, but seductive, pleasurable and inspiring."
YouTube, Airbnb, Flipboard, Square, Pinterest, Etsy, Path, AboutMe, Slideshare – all these well designed, successful products were co-founded by designers.
Just think how Samsung and Apple fiercely fight over design patents. They want to conquer customers’ emotions with unique designs. Remind yourself of Microsoft, who surprised the design world with a coherent, beautiful system across devices – Windows 8. Google, the former engineers' kingdom, redesigned all its significant products and employs UX designers all over the world. And of course Apple, the most valuable company in the world, built its success on well-crafted designs. These are all signs of a change of paradigm.
User experience design (abbreviation UX, UXD)
A discipline focused on designing the end-to-end experience of a certain product. To design an experience means to plan and act upon a certain set of actions, which should result in a planned change in the behaviour of a target group (when interacting with a product).
A UX designer’s work should always be derived from people’s problems and aim at finding a pleasurable, seductive, inspiring solution. The results of that work should always be measurable through metrics describing user behaviour. UX designers use knowledge and methods that originate from psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science.
When you’re designing an experience, you are in fact planning a change in the behaviour of your target group. You’ve found out their problem and you’re trying to destroy the burden using design methods.
User experience lies at the crossroads of art and science and requires both extremely acute analytical thinking and creativity.
Designing a door handle
> Think about the
need to open doors
> Is the door handle usable?
> Does it encourage people to open doors?
> Does it provide a unique experience?
> Does it make the user want to open doors twice as enthusiastically as before?
Solving UX problems
Spot it, define it, feel the pain it causes and eliminate it. That’s the highway to great user experience.
Unique Value Proposition
(a single, clear sentence describing the way you’re different from your competitors and why you’re worth buying) and the canvas depicts your idea, key partners and resources, and your model of revenue.
Always remember that in any commercial project UX design cannot be separated from the business model of a product.
