The UI design process: Discovery phase In this phase, we learn about
your business requirements,
the users and the work being performed.
In many cases, we'll customize the process to fit your needs.
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Background In cases of
commercial software or websites,
we start with marketing requirements or functional specification.
Focus groups and usability studies on existing products
often provide good information.
In cases of internal
productivity applications, the
focus group is made up of the
employees who will be the
primary users of the
application. |
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Interviews Most applications
have different "groups" of
users. For external
applications, it helps to talk with marketing, product management, engineering,
support, management and others. For
internal applications, a strong
sampling of the different groups
that will be using the software
is essential. Each group can see the same project differently. Working with your staff often brings up ideas, assumptions and decisions that they have never had the chance to share with each other. Group design exercises help foster those ideas. |
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Personas: usage scenarios and user definitions
Some of the questions we'll be
asking is "Who are the users of
the product?" and "What are they
trying to accomplish?" From
these questions and others,
we'll begin to develop what's
called Personas; stories of each
user group, how they interact
with the program and what their
goals are. We'll take a group of
people and turn them into a
Persona; a fictional person who
embodies the goals and ideas of
the group we interviewed. We'll
even give them a name and a face
which will bring that persona to
life and invigorate the design
process. While the stories in each persona describe in detail the tasks and goals of the user, they do not go into any detail about the user interface (UI). The purpose of the personas is to illicit design ideas and lead us into the next phase of the design process. |
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Brainstorming With an understanding of the goals, features, and users, we
facilitate brainstorming sessions. It's a good opportunity for us to learn what
you've been thinking and for us to give some initial feedback. |
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Group design exercises We'll
take the group that each persona
represents and work with them to
solve design problems.
This involves discussing each problem and then sketching possible solutions to explore
different aspects of the user interface. This process is extremely valuable and always worthwhile. For many of the people at your company, it may be the first time that everyone's been in one room to discuss the UI in detail. In this forum, many of the ideas and assumptions will be shared to promote discussion on what everyone thinks the product should look like. If we don't share those thoughts, it'll be a problem later. |
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Design directions. This research leads to initial prototyping to explore design
possibilities in the Design Phase.
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