Introduction
Why We Wrote This Book
Welcome to the second edition of A Project Guide to UX Design.
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.
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.
A Word from Russ
A lot has changed since the first edition, but fundamentals still exist. As UX roles start to expand to encompass more responsibility (content strategy, research, kick-off meetings, design, prototyping, testing with users, and so on), it is sometimes difficult to find for a good place to start. We like to think we have offered up a good place to start in UX. It will not encompass everything, and it will not go as deep as everyone needs—we have done our best to supply additional resources to help you take the deeper dives where it is important to you, while providing you a foundation that helps you get started.
I was at the Information Architecture Summit (www.iasummit.org) in 2008 when the idea for this book first began to take shape. I started planning and plotting an outline of the topics I wish someone would have covered with me when I was getting started, and luckily, I found Carolyn a willing and capable co-author who helped sand the corners off of the ideas and inject her own. That start, and the back-and-forth iterations on the content, eventually became this book.
A Word from Carolyn
For many years now, I’ve been in the lucky position of building and managing UX teams. I say “lucky” because I find that UX designers in general have a great balance of characteristics that make them plain fun to work with, mixing right-brain intuition and left-brain logic.
As I’ve conducted interviews to build these teams, one thing has really stuck out: A related educational background, like human factors or communication design, is a great indicator that someone is committed to the field of UX design, but it’s not the number one indicator of whether someone would be a good fit within the team or on a project. Just as important—if not more so—is the person’s ability to have a consultant’s mind-set. This means a positive attitude, a drive to understand and include others throughout a project, and—above all—a focus on making a real impact for users and clients.
This mind-set means taking the time to understand the perspectives of other roles on the project, making cases, and making compromises where necessary. It takes experience and effort to get this mind-set down really well, but having an open mind, a strong foundation, and a good set of questions (with the courage to ask them) can take you a long way. This book may not supply all “the answers,” but it will give you the questions to ask to help you find them.
Who Should Read This Book
A Project Guide to UX Design provides a broad, introductory overview to UX design within the context of a project. Anyone with an interest in UX design should find something useful here. We focused on the following groups in particular:
Students taking UX design courses (such as human-computer interaction or interaction design) who want to supplement their coursework with information on how to apply their learning to real-life situations, where communication and collaboration are vital.
Practitioners who would like to deepen their knowledge of the basic tools and techniques of UX design and improve team communication about the roles involved. Chapter 3 is also particularly geared toward freelancers who need to create their own proposals.
Leaders of UX design groups who are looking for a book that will help their teams integrate project best practices with UX design activities.
Leaders of any project teams who are interested in learning more about how UX design integrates into their projects, what the value is, and what to expect from UX designers.
Be sure to visit www.projectuxd.com to read the bonus chapter “User Experience Design and Search Engine Optimization” and to download other bonus materials such as templates.
What’s New in the Second Edition
Most of the information from the first edition is still relevant three years later and is still present here, refreshed with some new examples.
In addition, you’ll find updates and new chapters based on the following reader suggestions and new developments in the field.
Mobile and gestural design considerations have been added to Chapter 2: The Project Ecosystem. The number of mobile devices, and frequency of their use, has outpaced that of desktops. They form a crucial part of your users’ ecosystem and should be a part of any digital product strategy.
Lean UX makes a new appearance in Chapter 4: Project Objectives and Approach. This approach has helped entrepreneurs bring a user-centered focus to developing new businesses in the face of high uncertainty.
Content strategy finds itself as a new topic in the book at Chapter 8. The content strategy field is blowing up and the information is timely, relevant, and a good springboard into the topic.
Design principles make their debut in the new Chapter 10. In response to reader requests for additional information on the elements of design, you’ll find some of the prevalent principles in visual design, interaction design, and psychology to ground your design decisions, as well as tips on creating unique design principles for your own products.
Prototyping got an overhaul in Chapter 13. Jonathan “Yoni” Knoll lent a hand (and by “lent a hand,” I mean “guided the process, wrote the code, made the examples available, and was an all-around good friend”) and guided the chapter to being closer to a primer for those interested in finding out if they want to be “designers who code.”
Chapter 12: Wireframes and Annotations was updated to include sketching and to show more of the process of creating wireframes. The change was minor and significant at the same time.
Remote research techniques and automated research tools get a deeper dive in Chapter 14: Design Testing with Users. You’ll find information on balancing the choice between remote and in-person research, as well as an overview of the types of results you might expect from some of the popular automated tools.
A Note on Methodology
There are a variety of approaches and methodologies out there. We aren’t proponents of one approach over another. Our goal for this book is to focus on the steps that are common to most projects: defining the project needs, designing the experience, and developing and deploying the solution. The amount of overlap between these steps will vary greatly depending on the project approach you use (see Chapter 4 for more detail). For the most part, our framework is a loose, linear approach, where the definition step comes first—but in each step we take advantage of facilitation and design techniques where they’re most helpful.
What This Book Is Not
An encyclopedia of all techniques. The UX field has an enormous number of creative people, and they’re always trying new approaches to design problems. Including all of those approaches here would make a much larger book—and one that would quickly be outdated. What we’ve included here are the most commonly used techniques, the nuts and bolts of UX design. We’ve tried to provide enough information to both intrigue you and allow you to communicate the activities to other project members—including the basic process for each technique and additional references to books or sites that will help you implement it once you choose your path.
A guide to being a project manager. Good project management (including setting and tracking project objectives, timelines, and budgets) is key to any project’s success. We don’t cover specifics on how to be a project manager or how to choose a particular project methodology. We do discuss the skills that a UX designer brings to a project that allow it to run effectively, such as facilitation and communication, as well as the ability to clarify and maintain focus on project objectives. These skills will help you become a partner in project management.
The only or the perfect process or methodology for you to follow. We don’t have all the answers—no one does, today. The UX design field is relatively young, and we’re all working to improve upon where we are. You will probably find that trial and error, enhancements and improvements, and feedback from others will help you tailor a process to fit your needs. When you find something that works for you—share it! Let us know!
How to Use This Book
There are many excellent resources out there for UX designers. We cover topics broadly here but point you to references that will allow you to explore topics at a deeper level depending on how much time you want to dedicate to them. To help you understand the amount of time generally needed for each reference, we’ve split them out into three major categories:
