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Foundations of UXD

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Design Thinking & Accesibility

User-centered design:

User-centered design puts the user front and center. Focusing on the user means considering their story, emotions, and the insights you've gathered about them.
To keep our focus on the user, the user-centered design process has four steps: understand, specify, design, and evaluate.
Following this framework helps us build products people actually want to use.
First, understand how the user experiences the product or similar products.
Really understanding the end user requires a lot of research, and we'll talk more about this later.
Next, specify the end user's needs.
Based on your research, you'll narrow down which end-user problem is the most important to solve.
Then, design solutions to the end user's problem.
This is where you'll come up with ideas for what the product might look like and actually start building the product.
Finally, evaluate your design against your end user's needs.
Does your design solve the end user's problem?
You'll find out here, and you'll also do it by testing your product with real people.
It's important to keep in mind that as you go through this process, iteration is key.
Iteration means doing something again, by building on previous versions and making tweaks.
A user is a person who is trying to solve a problem and is looking for a product or service to help them solve it.
The user experience is the journey that the user takes with that product or service. As a UX designer, your goal is to keep the user at the center of every decision you make, and to do that, you need to get to know your user.
To reach as many users as possible, you’ll consider questions such as these as part of your user research approach:
Do my users have impairments or disabilities to consider–whether temporary, situational, or permanent?
How familiar are my users with technology?
How are my users accessing the product or service?
Where and when are my users accessing the product or service?
Have I considered all my potential users?

The goal for user research is to get the widest possible selection of potential users to include as research participants. Make sure to consider income level; demographic data such as age, gender, and ethnicity; educational background; and geographic location.
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Assistive Technology:


The term assistive technology, or AT for short, is used to describe any products, equipment, and systems that enhance learning, working, and daily living for people with disabilities.
First, it's important to call out that there are lots of people who don't identify as having a disability but still use assistive technologies.
That's because ATs make our lives easier and help provide a better user experience.
Color modification, like high contrast mode or dark mode on a device, increases the contrast of colors on a screen.
Black text on a white background, or white text on a dark background are both examples of high contrast.
High contrast makes the interface easier to see for people with low vision.
Voice control allows users to navigate and interact with the buttons and
screens on their devices using only their voice.
Alternative text, or alt text, helps translate a visual user interface into a text-based user interface.
It essentially uses words to describe any meaningful image for someone who isn't able to see the image.
Alt text is also super helpful for those with low bandwidth connections, too.
If your device is unable to maintain a connection to the internet, it may struggle to load a big file or image.
Alt text is useful for context when an image fails to load.
You don't need to have a disability to benefit from assistive technology.
Speech to text is a great example. With speech to text, a user composes text by speaking into their phone or computer.
The voice recording is automatically converted into text.
A lot of people find it much easier to text by talking to their device,
because it offers a hands-free experience and
reduces the amount of mental energy needed to type.

Design Thinking: A UX design framework


In the world of UX design, a framework is a conceptual tool that provides guidance on the best practices and processes for solving problems and building solutions that solve the problems of real users.
The Design Thinking framework is a user-centered approach to problem-solving that includes activities like research, prototyping, and testing to help you understand who your user is, what their problems are, and what your design should include.
The Design Thinking framework involves the following phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
During the empathize phase, your primary goal is to learn more about the user and their problems, wants, and needs, and the environment or context in which they’ll experience your design.
Your user research might include user surveys, interviews, and observation sessions, and you might also need to conduct some research on the competitors’ products to determine how your user frames competitors’ products as part of their daily life and daily problem-solving.
In the define phase, you’ll analyze your research findings from the empathize phase and determine which user problems are the most important ones to solve, and why. This will drive you toward a clear goal for the design of the product.
After you land on a user problem and establish why it’s an important one to solve, it’s time for the ideate phase. The goal of ideation is to come up with as many design solutions as possible—don’t settle for your first solution because the most obvious solution is not always the right one.
Ideation involves collaborative brainstorming with other members of your team to generate as many solutions as possible to a problem. This could include marketing, engineering, product management, or any other stakeholders for the product or service. During brainstorming sessions, you should explore all possible solutions. Don’t focus on whether something is a “good” or “bad” idea, just collect as many ideas as you can.
After brainstorming, you’ll then analyze your potential solutions and start to make choices about which ones are the best options to pursue as prototypes. You might return to user or competitive research to help you narrow down your ideas, and you might also create user flows to illustrate how the user will interact with your solution.
After you have an idea of how to solve the problem, you’re ready to enter the prototype phase, where your goal is to produce an early model of a product that demonstrates its functionality and can be used for testing. The test phase is critical to developing the right solution to address your user’s problem, and an organized approach to testing can help you create exceptional user experiences.

Focus on the user.
Create solutions that address the user’s problems.
Collaborate with teammates across departments.
Validate your designs.
Iterate as needed to design the right user experience.

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Universal design, inclusive design, and equity-focused design.


Universal design is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of
abilities and in the widest range of situations.
As UX designers realized that universal design didn't meet the needs of every user, the approach to including people began to change.
Designers started thinking about the concept of inclusive design, which focuses on finding
solutions to meet different needs.
Inclusive design means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability,
race, economic status, language, age, and gender.
Inclusive design includes researchers and designers from traditionally excluded populations in the process, so they can provide their unique perspectives during all phases of the design process.
If universal design is a one-size-fits-all solution,
then inclusive design can be described
as solve for one, extend to many.
Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design.
Equity-focused design takes the idea of inclusive design one step further.
It asks designers to focus on designing for groups that have been historically underrepresented or
ignored when building products.
The goal of equity-focused design is to uplift groups that have been excluded historically.
In order to design with equity as a goal,
we first need to know the difference
between equality and equity.
Equality means providing the same amount of opportunity and support to all segments of society.
In other words, everyone gets the same thing.
Equity means providing different levels of opportunity and
support for each person in order to achieve fair outcomes.
Equity-focused design means thinking through all the aspects of a designed product and making sure the product is both accessible and fair to all genders, races, and abilities.
Plus, the designs need to specifically consider underrepresented and
excluded groups.
Accesibility:
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Design for different platforms:

A platform is the medium that users experience your product on.
Some common platforms are:
Desktop computers
Laptop computers
Mobile phones
Tablets
Wearables, like smart watches
TVs
Smart displays

The first consideration when designing for various platforms is adjusting design elements and features to fit different screen sizes.
In addition to the size of the screen, you also need to consider the way users interact with each platform and how those interactions might affect your design decisions.
It’s also critical to consider accessibility when developing your designs at each point.
In the world of UX design, layouts refer to the way that information is organized on the screen.
For example, when designing for desktop or laptop computers, you have the advantage of working with a familiar, standardized size: landscape (horizontal) mode.
The screen is wide, content can be laid out in columns, and there’s much more flexibility to design.
In contrast, mobile phone content is usually laid out in portrait (vertical) mode, which is ideal for scrolling. In addition, mobile phones often allow users the option to use landscape (horizontal) mode by rotating their device. Implementing this in your designs requires more work from you as a designer, but provides users with a wider range of options.
Consider the layout of content on a couple more platforms: tablets combine both the desktop and mobile phone user experience, which means you can incorporate aspects of desktop and mobile phone content layouts in your designs. Smartwatches tend to have compact square or rectangular screens, offering very little digital real estate to lay out content.
There are a lot of reasons why users might choose one platform over another, but functionality and the kind of tasks they want to complete is a huge driver.
Your designs for each platform will likely vary based on how and when you expect users to need the product.

There's a big difference in the amount of time users spend on mobile phones compared to desktop computers.
An average mobile session is 72 seconds, while the average desktop session is 150 seconds, more than twice as long.
Why is this important? Because it tells us that people use different devices in different ways.

Let's think about a few best practices when designing for mobile user experiences.


Call-to-action buttons should be placed front and center, allowing the user to easily complete the desired task, like joining an email list or adding an item to their shopping cart.
Navigation menus should be short and simple. We want to simplify the user experience on mobile. So menu options should only highlight the core functions of the product.
Use gestures that users already do, like tapping and swiping. Gestures should be intuitive and familiar to users.
Design for both directions a phone might be held. We need to consider the vertical portrait view of a mobile phone and the horizontal landscape view. We want users to have an effective experience no matter how they hold their phone.
Reduce visual clutter. Mobile phones have smaller screen sizes, so it's important to keep the visual experience simple.

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