Notes_Google UX Design_Course 2: Start the UX Design Process: empathize, Define, and Ideate

Week 1

What is UX research

UX research focues on understanding user behavior, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback.

Empathy

The ability to understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation

Collaboration

The ability to work with a range of people, personalities, and work styles

Foundational research

Questions you might consider during foundational research include:

• What should we build?
• What are the user’s problems?
• How can we solve those problems?
• Am I aware of my own biases, and am I able to filter them as I do research?

Common foundational research methods include:

• Interviews: A research method used to collect in-depth information on people’s opinions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings. You’ll often conduct interviews of your target users themselves.
• Surveys: An activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand what most people think about a product.
• Focus groups: A small group of people whose reactions are studied. For example, your focus group might bring together eight users to discuss their perspectives about new features in your design. A focus group is usually run by a moderator who guides the group on a certain topic of conversation.
• Competitive audit: An overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You’ll conduct your own competitive audit later in the course, so you will understand this research method well!
• Field studies: Research activities that take place in the user’s context or personal environment, rather than in an office or lab.
• Diary studies: A research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. Often, a user will log, or diary, about their daily activities and provide information about their behaviors and needs, which can help inform your designs.

Goal of foundational research: to help define the problem you would like to design a solution for

Design research

Done while you design. Within the product development lifecycle, design research happens during the design stage (stage three) to help inform your designs, to fit the needs of users, and to reduce risk. Each time you create a new version of your design, new research should be done to evaluate what works well and what needs to be changed.

In design research, goal is to answer the question: How should we build it?

Additional research methods that might be used to conduct design research include:

• A/B testing: A research method that evaluates and compares two different aspects of a product to discover which of them is most effective. For example, you might have users evaluate two layouts for the homepage of your app to find out which layout is more effective.
• Cafe or guerrilla studies: A research method where user feedback is gathered by taking a design or prototype into the public domain and asking passersby for their thoughts. For example, you might sit in a local coffee shop and ask customers if they would be willing to test your app design for a couple of minutes and provide feedback.
• Card sorting: A research method that instructs study participants to sort individual labels written on notecards into categories that make sense to them. This type of research is largely used to figure out the information architecture of your project, which we’ll discuss in the next course of the program — Course 3: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Designs.
• Intercepts: A research method that gathers on-site feedback from users as they engage in the activities being researched. Intercepts are often conducted in the field, so this type of research is often considered a subset of field research. An intercept study can provide quick, high-level feedback.

Post-launch research

Done after design is complete and product has launched. Within the product development life cycle, post-launch research happens after the launch stage to help validate that the product is meeting user needs through established metrics.

Goal: answer the question: Did we succeed?

Research methods might use to conduct post-launch research include:

• A/B testing
• Usability studies
• Surveys
• Logs analysis: A research method used to evaluate recordings of users while they interact with design, tools, etc.

Primary research

Research you conduct yourself

Secondary research

Can be infromation from books, articles, or journals

Quantitative research

Focuese on data that can be gathered by counting or measuring

If you want to know how the majority of users are experiencing a product

Often answer questions:

How many?

How much?

Qualitative research

Often based on interviews, where focus on a smaller number of users and understand their needs in greater detail

Survey

An activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand what most people think about a product

Usability studies

A technique that help us evaluate a product by testing it on users

KPI

Key performance indicators are critical measures of progress toward an end goal

How to decide the research method

Decided by the question we are trying to answer

Secondary research used when getting started with a project

If we’re just getting started with a project, we might use secondary research to know the stats, facts, and figures that already exist about our users

Interviews

To understand what users think and why

Drawback of interviews

Cost money and time

Benefit of usability studies

Observa first-hand user interaction with product

Let the user give in-depth feedback

6 biases

Confirmation bias

False consensusbias

Primacy bias

Recency bias

Implicit bias

Sunk cost fallacy

Bias

Favoring or have prejudice against sth based on limited information

Confirmation bias

Occurs when you start looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis you have

A way to avoid confirmation bias is to include a large-sample of users

False consensus bias

Happens when we overestimate the number of people who will agree with our idea or design, which creates a false consensus

Recency bias

That’s when it’s easiest to remember the last thing you heard in an interview, conversation, or similar setting, because it’s the most recent

Primacy bias

is another reason to take detailed notes or recordings, so you can review everything that happened, not just the memorable first impressions

Implicit bias

A collection of attitudes and stereotypes we associate to people without our conscious knowledge

Sunk cost fallacy

The deeper we get into a project we’ve invested in, the harder it is to change course

Overcome biases

Reflect on our behaviors, and can ask others to point our implicit biases

Bias is a llimitation that extends well beyond the field of UX design and user research

Week 2

When empathize with someone

You share their mental and emotional experiences

UX design is

It is not about solving problems we assume users what solved. It’s about solving problems that users actually want solved

UX research

We might think we know who a user is and what they need, but UX research reveals who they really are and what they actually need, allowing us to better empathize with the user

How to empathize with users

Ask lots of questions. As a UX designer, you cannot make assumptions about the needs of your users. Instead, ask your users directly about their needs and wants, which your product design can address. Ask questions that begin with what, how, and why to gain a deeper understanding of your users’ perspective.

Become more observant. Shift your focus to the whole user and not just the words they are using. In interviews where the user is physically present or on a video recording, watching a user interact with you or your product can provide physical cues that can affect your research outcomes. To help capture observations, you’ll take detailed notes or even record your sessions with users.

Be an active listener. Active listening requires you to fully concentrate on, understand, and remember what is being said by the user you’re interacting with. Avoid getting distracted by where the conversation is going or what you might say next. In UX design, practicing active listening can help you get impartial feedback directly from your users, which you can apply to improve your designs.

Request input. It’s important that the feedback you receive is objective and unbiased. Friends or colleagues often provide biased, mostly positive feedback because they want to support or please you. So, it’s important to request input from a variety of sources and a diverse group of users. When asking for feedback, use open-ended questions to understand the user’s actual thoughts on the experience or product.

Have an open mind. We all have biases. Remember, a bias is favoring or having prejudice against something or someone, based on limited information. As UX designers, we have to set those biases aside to better empathize with others. Your goal is to understand users, not to complicate their feedback with your own opinions and emotions.

Keep current on UX research. Follow researchers and join online communities to stay up-to-date on the research that affects UX designers and the users you’re designing for. Research is always changing and evolving as we understand more about human psychology. Staying current will give you an advantage in how you understand and interact with your audience.

Pain point

Any UX issues that frustrate the user and block the user from getting what they need

Financial pain points

User problems related money

Product issue

These are usually quality issues related to the product

Process issue

These are frustrations that stop the user going from point A to point B

Support issues

When user interact with product, they might have questions. If they can’t find answers to their questions, they won’t feel supported.

Personas

Fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users

User group

A set of people who have similar interests, goals, or concerns

Week 3

User story

A fictional one-sentence story told from a persona’s point of view to inspire and inform design decisions.

Persona, User story, Journey map

If the persona is character, the user story is plot, the journey map is story outline

Benefits of user journey map

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’

Highlights new pain points

Journey mapping also highlights new pain points

Important to have conversations with disabilities

It’s important to have conversations with people with disabilities and immerse in the assistive technology that they might use

Websites need to support keyboard input and navigation

So all websites need to support keyboard input and navigation to comply with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Curb cut

A curb cut is the name for the slope of the sidewalk that creates a ramp with the adjoining street.

Curb-cut effect

The curb-cut effect is a phenomenon that describes how products and policies designed for people with desabilities often end up helping everyone

Week 4

Problem statement

A clear description of the user’s needs that should be addressed

Problem statements help establish goals

1. An effective problem statement tells what the user really needs. Defining the goal clearly and concisely gets everyone on the design team onboard and focused on the same thing
2. Understand constraints. Get to know what’s keeping users from satisfying their needs
3. Define deliverables. When finally solve the problem, what will we have to show for? It’s helpful to know what our solution will produce
4. Create benchmarks for success

Hypothesis statement

A hypothesis statement writes out our best educated guess on what we think the solution to a design problem might be.

Be flexible and adapt in order to with the best design solution

Be flexible and adapt as you go in order to end up with the best design solution

The human factor

The human factor describes the range of variables humans bring to their product interactions

Common human factors that inform design

impatience,

Limited memory

needing analogies

limited concentration

change in need

needing motivation

prejudices

fears

making error

misjudgment

Mental models

Internal maps that allow humans to predict how sth will work

Feedback loops

Feedback loops refer to the outcome a user gets at the end of a process

Isolation effect

States that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered

Serial position effect

When people are given a list of items, they are more likely to remember the first few and the last few, while the item in the middle tend to blur

Hick’s law

The more options a user has, the longer it takes for them to make a decision

Week 5

Ideation

Defined as the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic with no attempt to judge or evaluate them

No judgement

Be able to explore all ideas without judging them and throwing them out

Explore as much ideas as possible

Part of being a designer means intentionally exploring as many ideas as possible, knowing that some of them or even most of them won’t work

Important to have a reason for picking the idea

When reviewing the ideas, it’s important to have a reason for picking the idea you move forward with

Reason for picking the idea

1. is the idea feasible? is it technically possible to build
2. is the idea desirable? does it solve the user problem you’re focusing on?
3. is your idea viable? is it financially beneficial for the business

If an idea meets these three criteria, it might be a good option to move forward with

Ideation is focused on coming up with a lot of ideas

Why need lots of ideas

Let users test a bunch of ideas and they might find the right answer

Understand business needs behind design

This includes the business’s voice, tone, and budget

Ways of communication

Small changes in language communicate a brand’s voice and tone and help improve the user experience

Competitive audit

An overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Direct and indirect compotitors

Who do you consider to be your competition? Should include both direct and indirect competitors in audit

Benefits of competitors audit

Knowing all of these things can help you save time, money, and energy

• Giving you an idea of products already in the market and their designs.
• Suggesting ideas to solve early problems that you’re facing with your own designs.
• Revealing the ways that current products in the market are not meeting users’ needs. This is a gap for your product to address!
• Demonstrating the expected life cycle of a product in the same market as yours.
• Informing all the different iterations your product could take and how those performed for your competitors.

Innovation

Key is to understand what the competition is doing and use that as a starting point to push forward and innovate

Limitations of competitive audits

Should do competitive audits on a regular basis, not just once

Sketching by hand is a avaluable skill for master. Sometimes, hand are move quicker than brain

Crazy eight

Lets you compare ideas, see everyone’s different ideas, and narrow down the list of ideas before moving on with the best solutions

Best solution is users think

The best solution is always what your users think is best and not what you or your team thinks is best

User journey

The series of experiences a user has while intercting with a product

Figure out who you’re designing for and what their needs are

But part of the research process requires you, as the UX designer to figure out who you’re designing for and what their needs are

Whether have enough information

Consider whether you have enough information to go forward, or whether you need to go back to your research and collect more data