Your life is made of experiences. Your discoveries, achievements and relationships result either from practical contact with or observation of facts and events. The mechanics behind experience can be summarized in a simple statement: actions generate stimuli of positive or negative impact, which also generate positive or negative sensations. After being through that, you’ve got an experience.
Experiences can be found all over the place, but for scope purposes let’s focus on human-computer interaction. The user experience designer architects culturally relevant products with attention to, said Norman (1999), “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used”.
Creating a product that’s both easy to use and enjoyable demands acknowledge of a wide range of study fields, from psychology to visual design, passing through marketing, product design, usability engineering, among others. Psomas (2007) developed a framework that comprises the competences a UX designer or team should have, as follows.
Information Architecture
According to Psomas (2007), an information architect’s job is “designing a user interface (UI) structure that satisfies the corporate business strategy, product strategy, and user experience strategy and accommodates all use cases and product requirements”. Information architecture addresses questions such as “How do users move from place to place?” and “What rules exist that users have to work around?”.
The information architects delivers navigation patterns, information hierarchy and structure diagrams.
Interaction Design
The interaction designer creates the concepts of the artifacts and specifies the behaviour of the interactions in a system. It’s somewhat grounded to basic principles of cognitive psychology, involving the study of how individuals handle problem solving, memory and language.
The interaction designer delivers user goals, functional inventories, user requirements, wireframes and storyboards.
Visual Design
The role of the visual designer is giving consistent treatment of elements and components of an interface. Here comes the visual design theory, including color theory, typography, shapes, textures, sizes and the form psychology laws (Gestalt). The visual designer delivers mockups and style guides of interfaces.
Usability Engineering
Usability engineering is a field concerned with making human-computer interfaces highly usable, which comes to the accomplishment of tasks with both efficiency and efficacy. Some of the theoretical foundations of usability engineering are human cognition, percetion and behavioral research methodologies. An usability engineer delivers usability reports, findings, surveys, feedbacks, session recordings and usability recomendations.
Prototyping Engineering
Prototypes provide functional versions of interaction concepts. Since user interface (the presentational layer of an application) has became more and more separated from the business logic layer, prototypes are helpful to “alleviate uncertainty about design intentions, clarify functionality, and reduce the need for documentation” (Psomas, 2007).
Further reading and research references
NIELSEN, Jakob. Usability engineering. – Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.
UXMatters.com: Insights and inspirations for the user experience community. Available at: <http://www.uxmatters.com>.
NORMAN, Donald. Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex and Information Appliances Are the Solution. – MIT Press. 1999
PSOMAS, Steve. The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. Available at: <http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2007/11/the-five-competencies-of-user-experience-design.php>.Access date: Jun 28th. 2009
Comentários