《UX for Beginners:A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons》笔记（1）

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I: Key Ideas

1. What is UX

  • Your job is not to create the user experience. Your job is to make it good.
  • The goal of a UX designer is to make users effective.
  • UX is about “doing” the process of User Experience Design.
  • 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
    • you build and measure those solutions in the real world to see if they work.

2. The Five Main Ingredients of UX

  • Psychology: the designer must ignore their own psychology sometimes.
  • Usability: we want it to be so easy that even a (moron) could use it.
  • Design: In UX, design is how it works, and it’s something you can prove; it’s not a matter of style.
  • Copywriting: UX copy gets shit done as directly and simply as possible.
  • Analysis: Analysis is the main thing that separates UX from other types of design, and it makes you extremely valuable.

3. Your Perspective

Your own desires and experience can even work against the users.

  • 'empathy’: relate to the users
    • Do research.
    • Talk to users.
    • Study the data.
  • Not people who are dumber than you. People who know less.

4.The Three “Whats” of User Perspective

  • “What Is This?”: Just tell them. Directly. And use simple words.
  • “What’s in It for Me?”: It is better to show users what they will get, rather than tell them.
  • “What Do I Do?”: It’s up to you to figure out what the users might need, and tell them how to get it.

5. Solutions versus Ideas

  • Solutions are ideas with meaning for other people
    • if your ideas are not meaningful for other people—the users—then they are not meaningful for you.
  • Solutions are ideas that can be wrong.
    • UX 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.

6. The Pyramid of UX Impact

  • As a UX designer, your job is to create value—from the user’s perspective.
    The Pyramid of UX Impact

II: Before You Start

7. User Goals and Business Goals

The real test of a UX designer is how well you can align those goals so the business benefits when the user reaches their goal.

8. UX is a Process

  • UX designer’s Process
    • gather the information you need
    • research the users
    • design the solution
    • make sure it is implemented properly
    • measure the results
  • figure out where UX should fit, not just where your company expects it to fit

9. Gathering Requirements

  • As a UX designer, your most ingenious creative ideas will come from the limitations and restrictions you define by studying the problem.
  • Collect problems that could be solved, things that can’t be changed, or technical things that must be included.
  • You’re a UX designer now; other people’s needs are your needs.
  • When someone says they need something, ask why. If the answer is something about the opinions or expectations of other people, ask more questions.

10. Building Consensus

  • As a UX designer, you need to have reasons to support your design before you design it, and you have to be able to defend your choices.
  • Good research, good theory, and good data are persuasive.

III: Behavior Basics

11. Psychology vs. Culture

  • Psychological purpose is usually more general, but they have the most impact overall.
  • Cultural elements cannot be optimized, only customized.

12. What is User Psychology?

  • UX Design can affect that brain in lots of predictable ways. And that’s what you’re gonna learn: your brain, on design.
  • UX Design is the practice of creating nonrandom effects in people to solve a problem.

13. What is An experience?

  • What the user feels
    • The good things about feelings are that we can see them on a user’s face, users can tell us about them, we can measure them, and we can relate to them, so feelings are easy to study.
  • What the user wants
  • A user’s motivations are the engine of their behavior.
  • What the user thinks(cognitive load)
  • What the user believes
  • The reasons people believe things are fairly predictable though.
  • More important, your intuition has predictable laws that most people don’t know about.
  • What the user remembers
  • We only remember certain parts, we change those memories over time, and sometimes we remember things that never even happened.
  • Your design can determine which parts someone remembers, and which are forgotten.
  • What the user doesn’t realize
  • UX designers must also design things that users will never notice, never give you feedback on, and maybe never remember.
  • Those design elements will change the user’s behavior, and only the data can show you how.

14. Conscious vs. Subconscious Experience

  • Conscious Experience
    • Your conscious experience may feel like the whole experience, but it is actually just a small part. However, it’s still significant.
  • Subconscious Experience
    • Subconscious experience seems like it “just is.”
    • Things are supposed to be easy.
    • If you want users to trust or understand, your design must feel trustworthy or obvious. If it doesn’t, you can add as much delight as you want and it ain’t gonna fix nothing.

15. Emotions

  • Two categories of emotions: Gain and Loss
    • Gains give you positive feelings.
    • Losses give you negative feelings.
  • Emotions Are Reactions, Not Goals
    • There are two types of feelings: emotions and motivations.
    • Motivations are what we want (goals),
    • Emotions are how we feel when we gain or lose what we want (feedback).
  • Time Makes Emotions More Complicated
    • Your emotions, or your “mood,” change all the time. Within reason, that’s normal.
    • Manage the user’s feelings throughout their experience by giving them the information and signals they need to feel comfortable.

16. What Are Motivations?

  • Motivations can fall anywhere between conscious experience and subconscious experience.
  • Motivations are relative. That means it’s not about how much you get, it’s about how much more you get compared to what you have or what other people have.
  • The 14 Universal Motivations
    • Avoid death
    • Avoid pain
    • Air / water / food
    • Homeostasis
    • Sleep
    • Sex
    • Love
    • Protection of Children
    • Affiliation
    • Status
    • Justice
    • Understanding(Curiosity)

17. Motivation: Sex and Love

  • Sex: Provide the information users need to judge “quality” (popularity, interests, physical appearance, etc.) and to find whatever matches their taste.
  • Love: Provide features to filter, compare, ask questions, save, follow-up, etc.

18. Motivation: Affiliation

Allow users to belong to a group or be identified by things they have in common—like joining guilds or “Liking” pages or choosing color schemes.

19. Motivation: Status

Let users personalize some features, like a profile picture or privacy settings, and never take big choices out of their control. Create a way to measure users’ actions so they can compare themselves to others.

20. Motivation: Justice

Have rules of conduct, or symbols of respect and honor, or give users the power to choose champions.

21. Motivation: Understanding (Curiosity)

  • Think of a way to make your product seem like a motivational gain, or not having your product seem like a loss.
  • You also have to consider the case when users want to understand.
  • When you change or remove features, avoid using curiosity as a marketing strategy. Tell users what is coming, tell them why, show how it will work, and give them time to adjust, (if you can). Otherwise, users will be angry or afraid, because you’re taking away something they already understand. That’s a loss.

IV: User Research

22. What is User Research?

  • There is never a bad time to do user research. Do it early, do it often. The important question isn’t when. It’s what. As in “what are you trying to learn about your users?”
  • Subjective and Objective
    • Subjective Research: The word “subjective” means that it is an opinion, or a memory, or your impression of something. The feeling it gives you. The expectations it creates. Not a fact.
    • To get subjective information you have to ask people questions.
    • Object Research: The word “objective” means a fact. Something true. Something you can prove. Your opinion doesn’t change it, no matter how hard you wish.
    • Objective data comes in the form of measurements and statistics. But, just because you can count something doesn’t make it objective or “data.”
  • Collect as much info as possible for your research.
  • Subjective things can never be true; only more or less popular.

23. What isn’t User Research?

  • The users are testing your design. If they don’t do what you want them to do or if they don’t understand, that’s your fault, not theirs.
  • Your job is to listen to what the users say, not to be their design monkey. Listen to what users think, watch how they try to get things done, and understand how and why they get lost in your designs. Then go find solutions to those problems.
  • User research is not a way to confirm your beliefs; it’s a way to discover them.

24. How Many Users Do you Need?

  • The less obvious the problem, the more people you need to find it.
  • If you only test a single type of user, you’ll miss any problems that are caused by other types of thinking. Throw in a few random weirdos—not your colleagues—just to see what they do. You might make some interesting discoveries.

25. How to Ask Questions?

  • Three Basic Types of Questions:
    • Open Questions: This allows for a wide range of answers and works well when you want all the feedback you can get.
    • Leading Questions: This narrows the answers to a certain type. Be careful: this type of question also excludes answers you might want to know!
    • Close / Direct Questions: This type of question offers a choice: yes or no; this or that.
  • Types of research methods:
    • Observation: Give people tasks or instructions and watch them use your design, without help. Afterward, you can ask them questions.
    • Interviews: Get somebody and ask them a set of questions, one-by-one.
    • Focus Groups: Get a bunch of people in a room together and ask them to discuss your questions.
    • Surveys: A form, which people answer on paper or online. These can genuinely feel anonymous, which is useful.
    • Card-Sorting: Each person gets a set of ideas or categories (on cards or post-its or online), which they sort into groups that make sense to them, personally. ProTip: don’t use your colleagues for this.
    • Google: It’s amazing how many useful opinions you can find online, for free, right now.
  • Important
    • Ask the same questions, the same way, to everyone.
    • Avoid interpreting questions or suggesting answers.
    • People might lie to avoid embarrassment or if it seems like you prefer a particular answer.
    • Take notes or record the interview. Do not rely on your memory, ever.
    • Don’t eat yellow snow (Don’t do stupid things).

26. How to Observe a User

  • Make sure you record your research as it’s happening. Don’t rely on memory.
  • If you have video of the screen and their face, you can take advantage of those real-time clues later.
  • The more the user doesn’t do what you expect, the more useful the testing is.
  • Letting users fail is sometimes the most useful result you can get.
  • Always approach user testing as if you expect users to lie about something, even if they don’t realize it, because you can’t trust a user any farther than you can throw them.

27. Interviews

  • What: An interview is a set of questions, created by you before the interview, asked to a user, in person.
  • Good Interviews:
    • You can ask follow-up questions; find out if your questions are confusing; give people tasks to complete; and get long, open answers to questions that might be harder to answer in writing.
    • You can also watch users and get nonverbal clues, and you can learn about things where time limits are built into the experience, like games, quizzes, or real-time messaging.
    • You can hand-pick the testers.
  • Bad Interviews
    • You are there, so testers might adjust their behavior and opinions to get approval from you.
    • It is harder to get real people to come to a place that is good for you, so you will usually end up testing with fewer users.
    • The social nature of a face-to-face interview is not good for embarrassing or private products and services.
    • Introverted users probably can’t imagine anything worse than a face-to-face interview.
  • When: You need to test subjective stuff with many steps or decisions involved, like navigating around a site to select the perfect latex body suit. Or if you need to ask follow up questions depending on the user’s behavior.

28. Surveys

  • What: A survey is a set of questions that a user answers by filling out a form on paper or online, privately, and sometimes anonymously.
  • Good Surveys:
    • They allow users to participate privately and therefore be more honest.
    • Every user gets precisely the same questions, and you (the designer) can’t screw it up by asking the questions wrong.
    • It is easy and cheap to get thousands of people to answer a survey.
    • Nobody has to feel disappointed, because a UX survey never says you are most like Malfoy.
  • Bad Surveys:
    • You can’t ask follow-up questions, so it takes more careful preparation to create a survey.
    • It’s easy to accidentally influence the results by how you ask the question or the order you choose for the options.
    • People are lazy, so the longer you make the survey, the fewer people will complete it.
    • You can’t retake a survey to choose all the answers that make you Harry or Hermoine, even if you know—in your heart—that you’re not like Malfoy.
  • When: You want to compare the answers of users to each other, or control the way questions are asked, or ask a lot of people, or control the mix of ages, genders, locations, etc.

29. Card Sorting

  • What: Basically, you give each user a set of topics or ideas written on “cards” —- maybe types of content or features you’re considering and ask them to organize the cards into categories that make sense to the user.
  • Good Card Sorting
    • • Designing big, complex sites like Wal-Mart or eBay can seem overwhelming at the beginning. Card sorting helps you get started.
    • You can discover structure within a pile of ideas that seem random or unrelated, or learn about the priorities of your audience without asking them directly.
    • I did card sorting for a digital agency’s website, because I understood the content too well and couldn’t think about it from the users’ perspective. It also revealed differences in the way clients and prospective employees thought about the agency.
  • Bad Card Sorting
    • • It is deinitely a bit tedious to set it up, and the answers are more of a guide than a solution.
    • Card sorting is only as good as the material you put into the experiment.
    • Users will organize the cards you provide for them, whether that makes sense or not.
    • If your site/app is a tool, like email, or something less traditional, like Tinder, card sorting might give you unhelpful results. Card sorting is designed to reveal assumptions and expectations, not innovation.
  • When: You know what types of content or features you want to include, but the actual strategy for organizing that content isn’t so obvious.

30. Creating User Profiles

  • What: Profiles or personas describe the goals, expectations, motivations, and behavior of real people. All the information you need should be in your research and data.
  • When you think about features, think of the most valuable version of the users you see in real life. You’re not trying to support the current behavior; you’re trying to nudge those users toward an “ideal” version of themselves.
  • Also remember that all users are not alike! You will probably have a few different behavioral groups, and they all deserve a good proile.

31. Devices

  • Finger or Mouse?
  • Start small: if you design for the smallest, least powerful device irst, then you will focus on the content and your core functionality. That leads to simple, beautiful apps/sites.
  • What special powers does this device have?
    • different devices require different thinking sometimes.
  • Consider the software: Every time you support one, it multiplies the design, development, and maintenance time in the future. Think ahead!
  • Be responsive: Decide whether a couple different layouts will do the job or whether you should create a fully responsive site for all types of customers.
  • Think about more than one screen at a time.

V: The Limits of Our Minds

32. What is Intuition?

  • Intuition is constructed from your experiences; you expect certain things based on what you have experienced before.
  • Trusting your gut guarantees you will be wrong eventually. Many times. Not trusting your gut is the only way to avoid those mistakes.
  • A UX Designer’s Job Is to Design for Other People’s Gut Feelings Not your own. Not your own.
  • You need data and user feedback to know for sure.

33. What is a Cognitive Bias?

  • Cognitive biases are sort of like that. If you ask people certain types of questions, or ask in a certain way, the “intuition system” will reliably choose the wrong answer.
  • We can let users choose whatever they want, and most of the time they will choose what we want. If you do it right.
  • Some examples:
    • Anchoring
    • Bandwagon Effect
    • Decoy Effect

34. The Illusion of Choice

  • Always give users the options they need, and make sure everything is easy to ind, but—as a UX designer—you can also maximize your own goals, without sacrificing anything for the user.
  • Four good principles:
    1. The Paradox of Choice: The more options you offer someone, the harder it is to choose.
    2. What You See Is All There Is: Most people will only consider the choices that they are offered, even if other possibilities exist.Every choice should take the user closer to their goal, and you can design the choices so they are good for your goals in the process.
    3. Choose Defaults Wisely: The lazy option should be the best one for your company and—ideally—for the user. If the user can truly choose “anything”—like a pay-what-you-want situation—then anchoring is the way to set a default in their mind.
    4. Comparisons Are Everything: Users are choosing things based on comparing their options. Therefore, you should create comparisons that make your preferred options look better.

35. Attention

  • What: Your brain can only consciously do one thing at a time, so it has to focus. That focus moves from one thing to another, all day long. That’s called attention.
  • Ways to get the attention of users:
    • Motion: This is the highest-ranking part of your visual system, so when something moves, your attention is drawn to it by relex. But if everything is moving, the stationary item gets the attention.
    • Surprise: When something doesn’t match what we expect, we notice.
    • Big text
    • Sound: Audible alerts can be one of the most annoying things on the Internet, but it does get your attention. When used more elegantly, it works well.
    • Contrast and Color: These can make parts of your design jump out from your peripheral vision. Users will notice those parts without looking directly at them.
  • Good UX is reductive, not expansive.

36. Memory

  • The experiences you remember are not complete, accurate, honest, and sometimes they aren’t even real.
  • Your brain puts more emphasis on the experiences that have stronger feelings and more “novelty” (they grabbed your attention, at the time). Your brain is also good at remembering patterns and things you do over and over. That’s called practice, or a habit, or muscle memory.
  • Few tips to change people’s memories:
    • Remind them of the good parts.
    • Create habits: It is useful to build patterns of clicks/touches that people can learn and repeat quickly.
    • Personalize: Many websites use your choices to improve your next visit.
  • You should record interviews or take notes that are good enough for someone else to use, and document your research (with sources!).
  • Some things we remember are completely false.

37. Hyperbolic Discounting

  • Usability is basically the idea of getting people to the things they want as close to “now” or with as little effort as possible. The more work it takes or the longer they have to wait, the worse the experience feels.
  • Everything in your design should be based on getting users to the most valuable actions as quickly and easily as possible. But your design should also make destructive actions more time consuming and unemotional so they feel less appealing.