Strategy: UX Strategy

As a UX designer, your job is to make sure Web-site visitors have the best user experience possible. However, users are bound to make mistakes. Whether because of their being unfamiliar with your user interface, clicking something accidentally, or simply misinterpreting your instructions, mistakes are all but unavoidable. Nevertheless, you must take steps to prepare for the unexpected so your audience has a smooth, positive experience when they engage with your brand.

While it’s true that some mistakes are great learning experiences for visitors, too many errors can make them feel frustrated and possibly drive them away from your site. So you need to have a little foresight, predict what mistakes your visitors might make, and prevent them before they turn into problems. In this article, I’ll cover several actionable error-prevention strategies for UX design and describe the benefits you can expect if you decide to act by following these strategies. Read More

My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.

In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design. Read More

When you’re participating in large stakeholder meetings, using analog UX strategy tools can often be a helpful and fun means of clarifying and working through a product, problem, user goals, or business goals. In this article, I’ll explain some benefits of using analog tools during large meetings and workshops, as well as how to encourage people’s participation and develop a shared understanding among everyone who is involved.

Discovering Analog Tools

From concept to execution, using hands-on tools throughout the UX design process can improve collaboration, communication, and the organization of your ideas in ways that digital tools cannot. For example, when kicking off a project, using simple sticky notes to post your ideas on a wall can offer huge benefits. In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of the design and innovation company IDEO, recommends using sticky notes because they allow a group of people to agree on solutions when many possibilities exist. People bring their unique knowledge and expertise to the table, and using sticky notes lets you organize large amounts of information concisely, while keeping a meeting fun and interesting. Read More