CS474: Human Computer Interaction - Designing the User Experience
Activity Goals
The goals of this activity are:- To identify design patterns and best practices for effective and inclusive user experience
Supplemental Reading
Feel free to visit these resources for supplemental background reading material.- Intro to UX: the Norman door
- The Formula for Phone Addiction Might Double As a Cure
- Katiyar, S. - Storyboarding and User Interface Design
The Activity
Directions
Consider the activity models and answer the questions provided. First reflect on these questions on your own briefly, before discussing and comparing your thoughts with your group. Appoint one member of your group to discuss your findings with the class, and the rest of the group should help that member prepare their response. Answer each question individually from the activity, and compare with your group to prepare for our whole-class discussion. After class, think about the questions in the reflective prompt and respond to those individually in your notebook. Report out on areas of disagreement or items for which you and your group identified alternative approaches. Write down and report out questions you encountered along the way for group discussion.Model 1: User Experience and Storyboarding
Questions
- How does disabling notifications, or changing their color, on a mobile device break the motivation-trigger-ability (the Fogg model) cycle?
- What elements (both qualitative and quantitative) might you measure if you were to observe usability?
- How might a mockup allow one to create unit tests prior to implementing a software system?
Explore Further
These curated resources define UX and the trade-offs within it:
- Nielsen Norman Group - The Definition of User Experience (UX) — Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen’s own definition, distinguishing UX from usability and from UI; Norman coined the term, so this is the primary source.
- Nielsen Norman Group - Usability 101: Introduction to Usability — defines the five quality components (learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction) that give you a vocabulary for critiquing designs more precisely than “good” or “bad.”
- Peter Morville - User Experience Design (the UX Honeycomb) — the classic honeycomb model arguing valuable experiences must be useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible — a checklist worth applying to your storyboards.
- Figma — the industry-standard collaborative design and prototyping tool, free for education; consider using it to storyboard and prototype your final project before writing any code.