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UX Design Process

Week two

Craft User Stories

A user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from a persona's point of view to inspire and inform design decisions. It introduces the user, lays out an obstacle, and states their ultimate goal.

Don't get confused if you notice some designers refer to these as scenarios or user cases, they mean the same thing.

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Advantages:

-User stories prioritize design goals.

-Unite the team around a clear goal.

-User stories personalize pitches to stakeholders.

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Keeping users on the happy path helps them have a good user experience, which is the designer’s goal.

An edge case is a rare situation or unexpected problem that interrupts a standard user experience.

Good UX anticipates edge cases and reroute users back to the happy path when things don't go as planned.

In edge cases, the obstacle is often beyond the user's control to fix.

Pro tip 1: Create personas and user stories.

If UX designers make sure their personas and user stories account for a wide variety of users and problems, they can keep even the most vulnerable users on the happy path.

Pro tip 2: thoroughly review the project before launch.

Pro tip 3: use wireframes. Wireframes help visualize the project, which makes it easier to identify potential user pain points and fix them before launch for folks who are not visually impaired.

User Journey Maps

A user journey is the series of experiences a user has as they achieve a specific goal. User journeys built off the personas and stories you've already created.

They help you think and feel like the user, which is super important. efore you start the user journey, you need a journey map.

A journey map is just what it sounds like, an illustration of what the user goes through to achieve their goals.

Benefits:

-A user journey map helps UX designers create obstacle-free paths for users.

- A user journey map reduces the impact of designer bias, which you might remember as the tendency for the designer to design according to their own needs and wants instead of the users.

-Lets you thoroughly document the entire sequence of events and interactions a user experiences, including the user's interaction with your design.

-Also highlights new pain points.

-Identifies improvement opportunities.

Consider accessibility during user research

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. Designing for accessibility is about considering all users’ journeys, keeping their permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities in mind. By researching how people with disabilities interact with products like yours, you can better understand how to design for them. It’s not possible to accurately guess all the ways that a user might experience your product, which is one reason why including people with disabilities in your research is so important.

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Touch: How would you design for users who have use of one arm, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Decide where to place buttons within your design based on several different hand sizes.

Create a feature that allows double taps to avoid accidental icon clicks.

Enable the one-handed keyboard feature and general keyboard compatibility.

Allow button customization for easy access to information that the user finds most important.

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See: How would you design for users who have limited vision, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Use a larger font to create a reader-friendly design of the app.

Ensure the app and the images have alternate text that can be read by a screen reader.

Detect whether the user is operating a motor vehicle.

Design the app with high contrast colors.

Don’t rely on text color to explain navigation or next steps. For example, don’t use red text alone as an indicator of a warning. Instead, your design should include explicit instructions.

Customizable text

There are some additional web accessibility tools that individuals with dyslexia or other visual processing disabilities may benefit from. One of these ways is customizable text, a feature that allows users to change how text is displayed in order to read the text more easily. Text customization involves changing everything from the color or font to the size or even the spacing of the text. For example, some fonts may be easier for users to read , so customizing fonts could be a great help. Therefore, customizable text allows more options than simply magnifying the text or zooming in, making the content more adaptable yet maintaining the functionality.

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Hear: How would you design for users who have limited hearing, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Don’t rely solely on sounds to provide app updates, like a new message notification. Instead, enable haptics, which are vibrations that engage a user’s sense of touch, and notification lights.

Apply closed captioning to all videos.

Provide a text messaging system within the app to allow users to communicate through writing.

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Speak: How would you design for users who cannot speak, either permanently, temporarily, or situationally?

Provide written intros, descriptions, and instructions for users, in addition to video-based content.

Provide Real-Time Texting during phone calls with users or with app support.

Arrange alternatives for automated systems that rely on speech recognition.

Provide an in-app messaging system that allows the use of emojis and image uploads.

Assistive technologies

For example, one service that’s recently been added by phone providers is

Real-Time Texting⁠

, which lets users text during a phone call to improve communication.

Another feature that helps people with disabilities is alternative text. People who have low vision or are blind often rely on screen readers to read the content on their screens aloud. But, if your informational icons don’t have labels or alternative text, the screen reader can’t describe the functionality of that button to the user. Not every image or icon is informational, so only include descriptions when necessary.

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6 Principles for Inclusive Design | by Lillian Xiao | UX Planet⁠

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Course 2 Week 2 - Glossary of terms and definitions - Google Docs⁠

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