Thought questions
1. Users and their domain
You work at a photo editing software company, and your team is developing a new menu system that changes how customers would navigate the software. What are some key questions you would ask when creating different personas for the software users.
Some important questions to ask when changing the menu system of a software website are:
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What experience does the user have with photo editing software?
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What does the user need this software for? Work, fun, etc.
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What frustrates the user?
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What makes the user happy?
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Demographics
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What goal is the user trying to achieve on this website?
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What technical knowledge does my user have?
2. Visualizing user experience
Think about the experience of buying airplane tickets. Draw a sample empathy map and journey map for this experience. What is the difference in the information that each convey?
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The empathy and journey maps differ slightly in the information they present. Empathy maps are personal to a user. They illustrate what a user says, thinks, does, feels, or some similar variation of these. Sometimes they display what a user feels, sees, or hears. For this example, the user was an airline ticket buyer.
Journey maps follow a users "journey" through a task or experience. For this example, the journey was buying airline tickets.
Empathy maps are personal to a user while journey maps are more about a users experience and less about their emotions.
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Empathy Map
Journey Map
3. International and cultural differences in UI design
You work for an American airline that has recently started servicing the Netherlands. They have employed you to help with redesigning their ticket purchase site to be more appropriate for Dutch culture. What cultural differences and habitual tendencies should you keep in mind when doing so?
HINT : Cultural analysis suggests that Dutch people are more pragmatic and thrifty than Americans meaning that money is a strong motivator and demotivator. It is also common for Dutch people to use nicknames, shortened names or initials on unofficial documents that are not necessarily reflected on their passport.
When considering designing for American users as well as Dutch users, their cultural and habitual differences must be taken into account. Being that Dutch users are pragmatic and thrifty while Americans tend to not be as thoughtful in their spending, different design considerations need to be prioritized for each population. It is important that websites aimed at Dutch users have features that revolve around saving the user money. For example, it may be more important for the Dutch-aimed website to focus more on the presence of a good deal on an airline flight and less on “comfort” and upgrades like American sites tend to do. Because Dutch users tend to use nicknames or initials on unofficial documents that are not necessarily reflected on their passports, it may be important to remind users to use their full names, as reflected on their passports, when entering data for their tickets.
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I took a look at a popular Dutch e-commerce website front page and compared it with Walmart’s front page. It is apparent that Walmart puts much less of an emphasis on sale items than the Dutch website. This would need to be considered by designers.
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Dutch site (translated):
Walmart:
Note: I had to scroll down through 5 rows before I saw a sale item.
4. Accessibility and UI design
Julie is a 55-year-old woman who is recovering from a severe stroke. She is experiencing vision problems, lack of fine motor skills, right-sided weakness, and memory loss. She is also slurring her words and is having trouble understanding speech. How would you design an interface and workstation to allow users such as Julie to be able to have full use of it?
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When designing for someone with the range of disabilities Julie has experienced, many factors should be taken into consideration. I will list considerations for each part of the disability below.
Vision problems:
Designers can rely on textures for different options instead of relying heavily on colors. This could also be used in conjunction with making sure that contrast is sufficient and colors are easier on users eyes, disabled or not.
Screen readers or even magnifiers can be used (depending on the severity of her condition).
Fine motor skills & right sided weakness:
The size and distance between tap targets can be increased. Assistive touch can be used to make selections easier to make. Eye-tracking software can be used for selections.
Memory loss:
Distractions should be minimized if she’s having trouble managing her cognitive resources. Bookmarks can be used to help her remember the websites she needs to use. An application like Lastpass could also be used to hold all of her passwords so that she only has to keep track of a single password. This would be especially useful for this population. Also, breadcrumb trails can be used for navigating through apps in case she loses her way.
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Slurred speech:
Speech recognition software could be designed to allow for more time for speech input and clarification if the application deems that the confidence of the accuracy of the data is low.
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Trouble understanding speech:
Closed captioning can be used for video.
5. Data visualization
You work as part of a UX firm and have been tasked to prepare a report detailing the results of your latest project. The project involved running participants through a series of 10 tasks on a new weather app. You recorded time for each task and color preference from a list of four colors that will be used to design the app buttons. Describe how you would visualize the two types of data (bar graphs, maps, etc.) in a meaningful way and present it to your team and executives?
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For this thought question, in order to visualize time spent on each task and color preference, I would have an x-axis with the tasks and a y-axis with task number. I would then plot the time that users spent on each task by using the size of the bubble to indicate time, and the color of the bubble being their color preference. This visualization would work best on a digital platform so that the user can interact with it to see specifics about something like time.
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I would make an infographic of the data that is static. This could be more useful for showing big picture ideas since this will be an overview. I would represent the colors in bubbles so that you can compare the 4 colors against each other size wise. Then, I would plot the time on a graph with the x-axis being the tasks and the y-axis being time. I would plot these with standard deviations. Lastly, I would break down the average times into a bar so that people could see how much time a task took of the total time overall.
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6. Typography
You are tasked with creating the online edition of the university paper. How might you need to change aspects of the text when transitioning the articles online?
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Typography is an important consideration when switching newspaper formats from paper to online. Different considerations come into play when viewing text on different devices and for different purposes.
The first consideration is the font. When reading text, serif fonts can be difficult to read because of the tails, arms, stems, and descenders (the portion of lowercase letters that descends below the baseline) of the characters.
Double-storey letters are lowercase letters such as “a” or that consists of a closed bowl at the bottom and a stem with a finial arm at the top hanging over the bowl and creating a partially enclosed area above the bowl. For example, using a or g instead of a or g increases legibility because characters are more distinguishable from each other. It is much easier to confuse these single-storey letters.
Character counts also need to be considered. It is easiest to read when there are about 54-80 characters per line.
There are also different considerations for different texts. When reading a novel, say, the text will be more spaced out to allow for the reader to relax into a flow of reading. But when reading a short read like a short newspaper article, the use of text that allows for a shorter, quick scanning of texts is usually preferable. This kind of text is the traditional multi-column text that traditional newspapers use.
On screen text should have 15-25 pixels and should have a lower contrast ratio than printed text. While black text on a white background looks great printed, it is hard on the eyes when viewing it on a screen. Instead, dark grey text should be used on a white background.
7. Designing for older adults
Think about older individuals in your life that have struggled and do struggle with technology and websites. Considering what you know about being an inclusive designer, what is a product or website you frequently use that could be changed to better suit older users? How would you adjust that product or site?
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Many older adults have decreased capabilities when using technology. This is for many reasons such as cognitive decline, vision problems, physical limitations, etc. So, as researchers, we can recommend that we change the design of the website to accommodate these very important members of our population. Because older adults may struggle to use websites that are dissimilar from the websites they may have used in the past, it is important to make sure that the layout of the website is structured thoughtfully and consistently to maintain familiarity for these adults.
8. Designing for children
You are a consultant for a UX research and design firm. You are tasked with assessing the landing page of the PBS Kids website for children between the ages of 5-8. The link is provided below. Given what you have learned in this presentation and your previous knowledge of usability, conduct an evaluation of the page. Create a visual (diagram, infographic, etc.) to depict the outcome of your assessment or create a paper prototype showing what could be improved and/or kept.
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For the PBS kids site, I conducted a heuristic evaluation while keeping kids in mind. There were many questions that did not apply to this design, being that, 1. the webpage is fairly limited in its functions because it's intended for children, and 2. We are only looking at the front page and not navigating through the site. But, because so many features that only adults would typically use were missing, there were some that were very applicable such as the match between systems and the real world.
The PBS page does a great job at making the page simple to understand. Most buttons are obvious, or look like what they link to (e.g. a game looking like a board game piece). I did find an issue with consistency of buttons, however. Sometimes when you hover over a button there is an animation that makes it appear as if the button has been pressed, but with other selections on the page such as in the game catalog, this is not the case.
Other issues I found:
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There is no indication that you are on the “home” page.
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The scroll feature is unclear to me. It is an arrow that points down. This could make sense to a child, however. But I changed this feature on my redesign to a car on a road. I would make this appear selectable when hovered over. I would also explore the possibility of making these solid arrows that point up and down on a scrollbar if kids did not understand that, however.
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I noticed there were 3 tabs: “New games”, “Popular games”, “ Hard games” and no “Easy games” tab. I figured this might be so that kids don't get their feelings hurt, so in my design I changed this to display the games “normal - hard” or by “ages” starting at 5 and scrolling down to 8. But I think the difficulty level is more useful in case a kid is playing at the “wrong” age.
Otherwise, I think the website was well done. I added slightly more text to the page like “shows” and a game controller (rather than a board game piece) to the games tab. I did this because I imagine that kids may need their parents' help every now and then and the parents may not recognize the cartoon characters as movie characters. I also added a play icon similar to the one youtube uses for videos since that icon is universally recognizable.
9. Interaction styles and devices
Thinking about the different interaction methods covered in this presentation - touch & multi-touch, voice, and eye tracking & gestures - describe how each may be used as a tool to investigate teaching elementary students a particular subject such as math, science, language arts, music, etc.?
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For each interaction method, briefly describe the output you would hope to gain and how that contributes to your understanding of student learning and instruction. For example, what kind of data would you gather using that method? What would the analysis of that data tell you?
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All three of these interaction methods can be used to help students engage in learning. Touch and multi-touch screens can be used to help students engage in learning about things like classical mechanics, a concept learned in basic physics. It would be beneficial for a child to manipulate objects and see what happens when they do it. Even altering the amount of gravity so they could see how an object would act in space. The optimal output would be for the student to be able to explain what happens when different variables are adjusted (in this case, gravity). This could be compared with in-class activities that have the goal of teaching the students the same concepts. A study could be done to see which method children learned more from.
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Voice technology could be used to help children learn new languages. The communicative approach is the most effective type of learning when it comes to languages, and with a voice assistant this could be possible. As technology advances voice assistance will be able to understand a wider range of dialogue. But, for now, voice assistants could be used in schools to give children a more immersive learning experience. If they have to communicate with a voice assistant to say, play games where the children are rewarded when they provide correct answers and proper pronunciation, this could be engaging for children. Once the technology has advanced further, it may be a tool for speech-language therapists to recommend for their kids to use at home when they aren't in therapy. An output for this would be improvement in a child’s language skills.
Eye tracking could be used to study visual attention in children at school. If a classroom is set up with students wearing eye tracking glasses and a variety of teaching methods are used on these children, it may be a tool for investigating what types of teaching methods are the most engaging. A wide range of students in different age groups could be used. Once you’ve collected the data, you could gather insights that could be used for college or graduate students in education that are learning about teaching for certain age groups.
10. Agile / Lean UX
Your company wants you to work with the developers to create a new home/login page. Below is the schedule of sprints for the developers/coding team.
What should a UX team being doing and how in Week 2? Design/plan out the processes you intend to use in this situation. For example if you want to do a survey what would you ask, or if you are doing a usability test, how are you going to do that, etc.
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