Practical UX Design

Practical UX Design

by Scott Faranello
Released April 2016
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781785880896

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Book description

A foundational yet practical approach to UX that delivers more creative, collaborative, holistic, and mature design solutions, regardless of your background or experience

About This Book

  • Improve your UX design awareness and skills

  • Gain greater confidence to know when you have delivered a “good” UX design

  • Learn by example using a book designed by a UX mind for a UX mind

    • Who This Book Is For

    This book is written for the beginner as well as the experienced UX practitioner, regardless of team size, company size, or job title. It is also intended for anyone with an interest in UX, engages with UX, is involved in any way in interactive problem solving and design, or simply wants to learn more about what we do, how we do it, and why those in the UX field are so passionate about wanting to do it better.

    What You Will Learn

  • Awaken your UX mind and dispel the myths of non-UX thinkers

  • Create the six optimal conditions for your best ideas to appear

  • Identify and incorporate the ten design principles found in all good UX design

  • Develop a broader understanding of Information Architecture (IA) to better engage, guide, and inform

  • Develop a fundamental understanding of patterns and the properties that create them

  • Raise your level of UX maturity with a strategy that transforms your approach to problem solving and helps others understand the true value of your work

  • Utilize important tools of the UX trade that never go out of style

  • Increase your knowledge of UX, incorporate valuable ideas and insights into your work, and look at design from a very unique perspective

    • In Detail

    Written in an easy-to-read style, this book provides real-world examples, a historical perspective, and a holistic approach to design that will ground you in the fundamental essentials of interactive design, allow you to make more informed design decisions, and increase your understanding of UX in order to reach the highest levels of UX maturity. As you will see, UX is more than just delighting customers and users. It is also about thinking like a UX practitioner, making time for creativity, recognizing good design when you see it, understanding Information Architecture as more than just organizing and labeling websites, using design patterns to influence user behavior and decision making, approaching UX from a business perspective, transforming your client’s and company’s fundamental understanding of UX and its true value, and so much more.

    This book is an invaluable resource of knowledge, perspective, and inspiration for those seeking to become better UX designers, increase their confidence, become more mature design leaders, and deliver solutions that provide measurable value to stakeholders, customers, and users regardless of project type, size, and delivery method.

    Style and approach

    An in-depth, easy to read, and entertaining journey into and through the world of UX using real-world examples, thoughtful illustrations, and engaging quotes to inspire and explain fully the how and why of UX in a practical and impactful way and used immediately in your own work.

    Table of contents

    1. Practical UX Design
      1. Table of Contents
      2. Practical UX Design
      3. Credits
      4. About the Author
      5. About the Reviewer
      6. www.PacktPub.com
        1. eBooks, discount offers, and more
          1. Why subscribe?
      7. Preface
        1. What this book covers
        2. What you need for this book
        3. Who this book is for
        4. Conventions
        5. Reader feedback
        6. Customer support
          1. Downloading the color images of this book
          2. Errata
          3. Piracy
          4. Questions
      8. 1. The User Experience Mindset
        1. Dispelling the myth of "faster horses"
          1. The disservice of "faster horses"
          2. When facts ruin a good story
          3. Collaboration is a joke, but nobody is laughing
          4. Understanding the problem
          5. Customers/users are dumb!
          6. Shut up and listen!
        2. Data-driven design
        3. The meme that just won't die
        4. Design thinking: an idea worth investing in
        5. One more thing
        6. In closing, a cautionary tale
        7. Summary
      9. 2. Creative UX
        1. Essential mindset for Creativity
          1. Closed mode
          2. Open mode
          3. Open and closed modes in action
          4. Using open and closed modes together
          5. Stuck in a mode
        2. The six conditions for creativity
          1. Space
          2. Time
            1. Time – again
          3. The 10,000 hour rule
          4. Confidence
          5. Play
          6. Agreement
        3. Applying creativity to UX design
          1. The space between
        4. Summary
      10. 3. Good UX Design
        1. What is good design?
          1. Good design is non-obvious
          2. A brief history of good UX design
          3. Good design is invisible
          4. Good design creates emotion
          5. Good design is familiar
            1. When preference beats performance
        2. The principles of good design
          1. Good design is timeless
          2. Principles of good UX design, by example
          3. Innovative
            1. Good design isn't always original
          4. Useful
          5. Minimalist
          6. Understandable
            1. Understandable – how?
            2. Understandable—why?
            3. Design using the three-second rule
            4. Understandability – fail!
          7. Valuable
          8. Safety
            1. Provide affordances
          9. Long-lasting design
        3. Design exercise
        4. Native advertising revisited
        5. Summary
      11. 4. Foundations of Good IA
        1. Foundational IA
        2. The Four Cs of IA
        3. Navigation
        4. Mental models
        5. Taxonomy
          1. Sitemaps
          2. Taxonomy types
        6. Designing for change
          1. Change and consequences
        7. The IA of cities
          1. Fractal loading
        8. Focused IA
        9. Food for thought
        10. Fractal loading on the web
        11. Gauging your IA success
        12. Maps
          1. Wayfinding
        13. Seamless IA
          1. Four C's exercise
        14. More examples of good IA
          1. Amazon
          2. LinkedIn
            1. Coordination
            2. Cooperation
            3. Change
            4. Consequence
          3. Internet movie database
        15. Closing thoughts
        16. Summary
      12. 5. Patterns, Properties, and Principles of Good UX Design
        1. Patterns in UX design
          1. The 15 fundamental properties of wholeness
            1. Levels of Scale
              1. Levelling our expectations
            2. Strong centers
            3. Boundaries
              1. Testing boundaries
              2. Safe boundaries
            4. Alternating Repetition
              1. Regular repetition
              2. Random repetition
              3. Progressive repetition
              4. Flowing repetition
            5. Positive space
            6. Good Shape
            7. Local Symmetries
            8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
            9. Contrast
            10. Gradients
            11. Roughness
            12. Echoes
            13. The Void
            14. Inner Calm
            15. Not-Separateness
          2. Finding wholeness in your design work
        2. Pattern libraries versus style guides
        3. Summary
      13. 6. An Essential Strategy for UX Maturity
        1. The problem with UX
          1. The UX process game
          2. The misunderstanding of UX
        2. A different kind of UX approach
          1. Enterprise UX
        3. The business of UX
          1. Financial metrics
            1. Case study: Strategic e-mail marketing campaign
            2. Initial problem (as outlined by the stakeholder)
            3. My approach
            4. My process
            5. Results
          2. Operational metrics
            1. Case study: employee operational effectiveness
            2. Initial problem (as outlined by the stakeholder)
            3. My approach
            4. My process
            5. Results
          3. Human metrics
            1. Case study – improving user satisfaction and understanding
            2. Initial problem (as outlined by the stakeholder)
            3. My approach
            4. My process
            5. Results
        4. One more thing…
        5. The UX maturity map
          1. Level 1 – Awareness
          2. Level 2 – Repeatable
          3. Level 3 – Strategic
          4. Level 4 – Integrated
          5. Level 5 – Core
        6. Summary
      14. 7. UX Tools
        1. Tools of the UX trade
          1. Personas
          2. The human persona
          3. Ethnography
          4. Human centered design
          5. Journey maps
          6. Usability studies
            1. RITE usability testing
            2. Usability study reporting
          7. Visual design
          8. Cynefin
          9. Business model canvas
          10. Wireframes and prototyping
        2. A closing thought
        3. Summary
      15. 8. Final Thoughts and Additional Resources
        1. Measuring UX
          1. Metrics
          2. Books and articles
          3. Google terms
          4. Online measurement tools
        2. Enterprise UX
        3. UX-related websites
        4. UX-related books
        5. Mobile patterns
        6. Additional UX design tools
        7. People to follow
        8. Summary
      16. Index

    Product information

    • Title: Practical UX Design
    • Author(s): Scott Faranello
    • Release date: April 2016
    • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
    • ISBN: 9781785880896