UX for beginners: Key ideas

Lesson 1: What Is UX?

Everything has a user experience. Your job is not to create the user experience. Your job is to make it good.

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And what do I mean by “good” user experience? It is common to think that a good user experience is one that makes users happy.

Not true!

If happiness was your only goal, you could just throw in some Lolcats and random compliments and go home. But—although that’s not the worst universe I can imagine—your boss may not be satisfied with the results. The goal of a UX designer is to make users effective.

A user’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg:

Many people mistakenly think that “UX” means a user’s experience, but it is actually about “doing” the process of User Experience Design. A user’s individual experience is their conscious, subjective opinion of your app or site. User feedback is important—sometimes—but UX designers need to do a lot more than that.

“Doing” UX

UX Design (also sometimes called UXD) involves a process very similar to doing science: you do research to understand the users, you develop ideas to solve the users’ needs—and the needs of the business—and you build and measure those solutions in the real world to see if they work.

You will learn about all of that in this book. Or if that’s not your deal, Lolcats are still an option.

Lesson 2: The Five Main Ingredients of UX

Any one of these five ingredients could be a book of its own,
so I will be oversimplifying a bit. This is supposed to be a crash
course, not Wikipedia.

Although, to be fair, I’m pretty sure Wikipedia’s UX page was
written by a guy who heard about UX once… at that thing…
that time…

1. Psychology

A user’s mind is complex. You should know; you have
one, (I assume). UXers work with subjective thoughts and
feelings a lot; they can make or break your results. And
the designer must ignore their own psychology sometimes,
too, and that’s hard!

Ask yourself:

• What is the user’s motivation to be here in the first
  place?
• How does this make them feel?
• How much work does the user have to do to get
  what they want?
• What habits are created if they do this over and over?
• What do they expect when they click this?
• Are you assuming they know something that they
  haven’t learned yet?
• Is this something they want to do again? Why? How
  often?
• Are you thinking of the user’s wants and needs, or
  your own?
• How are you rewarding good behavior?

2. Usability

If user psychology is mostly subconscious, usability is
mostly conscious. You know when something is confusing.
There are cases where it is more fun if something is
hard—like a game—but for everything else, we want it to
be so easy that even a (moron) could use it.

Ask yourself:

• Could you get the job done with less input from the
  user?
• Are there any user mistakes you could prevent? (Hint:
  Yes, there are.)
• Are you being clear and direct, or is this a little too
  clever?
• Is it easy to find (good), hard to miss (better), or subconsciously
  expected (best)?
• Are you working with the user’s assumptions or
  against them?
• Have you provided everything the user needs to
  know?
• Could you solve this just as well by doing something
  more common?
• Are you basing your decisions on your own logic
  or categories, or the user’s intuition? How do you
  know?
• If the user doesn’t read the fine print, does it still
  work/make sense?

3. Design

As the UX designer, your definition of “design” will be
much less artistic than a lot of designers. Whether you
“like it” is irrelevant. In UX, design is how it works, and
it’s something you can prove; it’s not a matter of style.

Ask yourself:

• Do users think it looks good? Do they trust it
  immediately?
• Does it communicate the purpose and function without
  words?
• Does it represent the brand? Does it all feel like the
  same site?
• Does the design lead the user’s eyes to the right
  places? How do you know?
• Do the colors, shapes, and typography help people
  find what they want and improve usability of the
  details?
• Do clickable things look different than nonclickable
  things?

4. Copywriting

There is a huge difference between writing brand copy
(text) and writing UX copy. Brand copy supports the
image and values of the company. UX copy gets shit done
as directly and simply as possible.

Ask yourself:

• Does it sound confident and tell the user what to do?
• Does it motivate the user to complete their goal? Is
  that what we want?
• Is the biggest text the most important text? Why not?
• Does it inform the user or does it assume that they
  already understand?
• Does it reduce anxiety?
• Is it clear, direct, simple, and functional?

5. Analysis

In my opinion, most designers’ weak spot is analysis.
But we can fix that! Analysis is the main thing that separates
UX from other types of design, and it makes you
extremely valuable. It literally pays to be good at it.

So, ask yourself:

• Are you using data to prove that you are right, or to
  learn the truth?
• Are you looking for subjective opinions or objective
  facts?
• Have you collected information that can give you
  those types of answers?
• Do you know why users do that, or are you interpreting
  their behavior?
• Are you looking at absolute numbers, or relative
  improvements?
• How will you measure this? Are you measuring the
  right things?
• Are you looking for bad results, too? Why not?
• How can you use this analysis to make
  improvements?

Lesson 3: Your Perspective

You Know Too Much

Designing for people who know less than you is a core part of UX.

Not people who are dumber than you. People who know less.

You know that your site gets more powerful if you customize it, but users don’t. You know that your menu categories match the teams in your company, but users don’t. And you know your prices are high because licensing fees make your content expensive to make, but users don’t.

If users don’t know, users don’t care. And sometimes even when they do know, they don’t care! Licensing fees? That’s your problem. They can get a pirated copy for free.

Ask yourself:

• If you didn’t read the text, would you understand?
• If a user only had a few clicks to find what they want, would this design be your best bet?
• Are you judging a feature based on the time it will take to build it or the value to the user?
• Are you assuming users will click it just because it exists? (They won’t.)

Lesson 4: The Three “Whats” of User Perspective

A good design communicates three things:

1. What is this?
2. What is the benefit for the user?
3. What should they do next?

“What Do I Do?”

If the user understands what it is and they are motivated to know or see more, their next action should be obvious in your design.

It could be something small, like “What do I click now?” or “How do I register?”

It could be something bigger, like “How do I get started?” or “How do I buy?” or “Where do I get more training?”

There is always a “next” step. Sometimes there are a few possibilities. It’s up to you to figure out what the users might need, and tell them how to get it.

Lesson 5: Solutions versus Ideas

All types of designers work with ideas. And great ideas are great!

Ideas come in different flavors. Some ideas are things we would like to make, like, perhaps, a fish-and-chocolate soufflé. (“I love both of those things! They must be great together!”). Some ideas are meaningful to us in a personal way, like that tattoo that reminds you of your pet hamster, Chewy. God rest his soul. And some ideas are solutions to problems. That’s what UX is all about.

Solutions are ideas with meaning for other people.

Unlike most artists and designers, UX designers do not focus on the ideas that have meaning for themselves. You should care a lot about creativity, but if your ideas are not meaningful for other people—the users—then they are not meaningful for you.

That means you have to spend a lot of time trying to understand problems that mean nothing to you. And that might feel unnatural at first. That’s why UX is a unique, valuable job: it’s tricky.

Solutions are ideas that can be wrong.

In UX, we can test things. We can design more than one solution to the same problem and see which one is better. And we can ask users which solution they prefer.

This means that UX is a special kind of design: it can be wrong. And we can prove that it is wrong.

And the same solution can be right for one site, and wrong for another! Just because Twitter does it, doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

Lesson 6: The Pyramid of UX Impact

As a UX designer, your job is to create value—from the user’s perspective. Some parts of the UX process create more value than others. Spend your time wisely. You will learn about every part of the Pyramid throughout the rest of this book. For now, just understand that the bottom of the pyramid— the big layers—are the parts that can destroy a product if you ignore them. And they are often invisible. The top of the pyramid—the small layers—are the parts that might not add value to your product, no matter how much time you spend on them. And they are usually visible.