User Experience (UX) refers to how a human feel when interfacing with a system. User Experience design is about meeting the needs of the user or customer – ease of use, perception of value, utility and efficiency in performance.
At OptiSol, we focus on user-centered design. The subsequent sections of the document illustrate our principles and methodology in establishing a user centered UX design.
Ten Principles of UX Design:
1. Define Objectives: Enlist the project goals and agree on the objectives. Improving sales, Increasing Conversions, Attracting new customers, launching a new product – Define the objectives of the intended UX design project.
2. Know your Users: Understand user behaviors, needs, and motivations.
3. Focus on Usability: Measure how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals.
4. Organize Information: Organize, structure, and label content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.
5. Design User Interfaces: Focus on anticipating what users might need to do and ensure that the interface has elements (Input Controls, Navigational components, Informational components and containers etc.) that are easy to access, understand and use to facilitate those actions.
6. Design User Interactions: Create engaging interactive systems with well thought out behaviours. Define how users interact with the interfaces like what a user can do with mouse, touch, stylus etc.
7. Design Visuals: Aesthetically and strategically implementing images, colors, fonts and other visual elements. Successful visual design enhances the content or function by engaging users and helping to build trust and interest.
8. Plan Content: Plan, create, deliver and manage content to be used on the application. Content could be words, messages, images and multimedia that are used. Ensure useful and usable content that is well structured.
9. Implement Accessibility: Focus on how a disabled person accesses or benefits from a site, system or application. Refer Section 508 for accessibility compliance standards.
10. Integrate Analytics: Focus on collection, reporting and analysis of application usage data. Identify measures based on the user goals, use collected data to validate the success or failure of those goals.
User-Centered Design Process:
The focus of user-centered design is to gain a deep understanding of who will be using the product, learning from the users and providing a design that provides utmost satisfaction in terms of user experience.
Following are the general phases of User-Centered design process:
- Specify the context of use: Identify the people who will use the product, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it.
- Specify requirements: Identify any business requirements or user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.
- Create design solutions: This part of the process is done in stages, building from a rough concept to a complete design.
- Evaluate designs: Evaluation – ideally through usability testing with actual users – is as integral as quality testing is to good software development.
The UCD process is integrated into our Agile Development methodology with a focus on “Developing for User Experience”. Every Sprint in the agile development encompasses Plan, Analyze, Design, Test and Refinement of End-user experiences. And refine +
Design Tools:
Invision is a Powerful design Prototyping tools. Upload your design files and add animations, gestures, and transitions to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes.
Balsamiq Mock-ups is a graphical user interface mock-up and website wireframe builder application. It allows the designer to arrange pre-built widgets using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor.
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for macOS and Windows. It can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several colour models including RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, spot colour and duotone. Photoshop has vast support for graphic file formats but also uses its own PSD and PSB file formats which support all the aforementioned features.
Sketch is a proprietary vector graphics editor for Apple’s macOS, developed by the Dutch company Bohemian Coding.
