OUGD504 STUDIO BRIEF FOUR - KIMBERLEY BOTTOMLEY INTRO TO USER EXPERIENCE

What is user experience (UX)?
User experience is often confused with user interface design, and although the two are very similar, they are not the same thing.
User experience started off with Leonardo da Vinci's Kitchen Nightmare, circa 1430, where da Vinci designed a kitchen to be more efficient for food production and for the chefs and kitchen staff, which involved conveyor belts to transport the food around the kitchen and also water sprinklers incase of a fire. This was in essence a very good idea, and with the right, working technology would work very well, however this wasn't the case in da Vinci's time, and things went wrong with the conveyor belts and the water sprinklers went off and ruined the food.
More recently, Don Norman was the first UX professional in 1995, and the Apple iPhone was a massive leap in technology in 2007, and had one of the first effective designs which worked with people, rather than just showed off technology.

UX is...
Research and testing
Behavioural psychology
Data analysis
Persona development
Product design
Requirement gathering
Information architecture
Interaction design
Interface design
Nomenclature
Copy writing
Tone of Voice
Prototyping
Problem exploration
Responsive
Solution discovery
Visual design
Brand
Marketing and communications
Customer service
Design culture

UX as a process

What is a user?
Consumer
Audience
Customer
Person
Most importantly: HUMAN

Why is UX important today?
Online is no longer a destination. On and offline experiences are increasingly merging together. The rise of the digital native. Good user experience is a baseline. We're so much more connected than we've ever been before. Children nowadays are so much more accustomed to digital technology and the way it works than we ever had a chance of being at that age.

But what if you ignore the needs of the user?
Brasilia roadway system - The government didn't consult the public about a new road structure within the capital, and presuming everyone either drove around the city or used public transport to get around, they didn't build any paths at all. This resulted in the public carving their own pathways through the road system to get across the city.

What if you understand user needs?
Disney wristband - All your booking information is stored on this wristband, and you can add information to it regarding your booking, for example planning your trip, as soon as you receive it in the post. You can pre order meals on it so the restaurant knows exactly what you're having, and it has a tracker on it so the restaurant for example know when you're heading over for dinner, sot hey can prepare the table and have the food reader for your arrival.

How to include your audience?
Guerrilla methods - quick, inexpensive, sometimes free.

1) Identify your users
Lean personas, 15 minutes, low investment, low risk, no waste. Team sport. Validate and iterate.
2) Challenge assumptions
Research - fact, opinion, guess (FOG), surveys (survey monkey), fact to face (coffee shop test), observation (be where users are)
3) Include your users
Test - share your designs, can your audience 'use' your designs? Ask open ended questions.

Task: Produce step one of this process

The task was to create our own personas based on the target market of a specific band, to help with studio brief four. I chose the band The Score, even though this won't be the band I will redesign their website for, as their website it great already. The persona is called Sam, has beach curly hair, comfy, sporty clothes and a surfboard. he is aged between 18-26 and is from Cornwall. He has a girlfriend whom he lives with, and is an outdoor adventure teacher/coordinator. His behaviours are fun, easy going, drinks espresso's, likes being outdoors, an adrenalin junkie, is a morning person, has a small group of close friends, and enjoys a pint on the beach watching the sun set. Because of Sam's behaviour and background, his needs are an offline platform which he can play much from when he's out doing activities, without the use of wifi or bluetooth. Potentially a platform with a long bluetooth range that works wrong a wristband music player which he can take out and about and is waterproof and sturdy and can't fall off easily. Also a platform that syncs music between his phone, laptop at home and portable music player, to ensure he has the same music and playlists wherever he is.

It has been really beneficial to have Kimberley Bottomley visit today to talk about user experience as it really helped to consider my designs from the users perspective, rather than designing something that just looks aesthetically pleasing. This is something that I will definitely take into my future designs, not just digital but also analogue as well, as the user is always involved in ever design work, they still have to engage with the product whatever it may be, so they gave to 'get' it as such.