Day 4 - Designing for the User Experience

Oh and I thought I'd finished...

we had a presentation this morning which was really very interesting. A nice example of the difference of designing for experience was "design a vase" versus "design a way for people to enjot flowers in their home". Simple but effective.

Then it went into a great case study about redesigning a library system. It was one of those ones where you sit and think "I want that job...". The slides from this are going to be available at www.marcrettig.com/uxweek and when they're up there later today I storngly recommend you go and have a look - its a really nice visual represntation of the tools - their personas and their tools - nicely put together and very clear. In particular take a look at the Design Principles slide. Essentially it was an entire re-design of a library - from the physical architecture, the signage to the online system.

What was really interesting was they took an online experience (amazon) and applied it offline. So when a customer checks out of the library they get a little ditty with their printout saying "if you like this, you'd also like..." so it entices them to return and they get a feel for the depth of content within the library.

A nice thing they did was they started the project off by carrying out 3 scenarios - and they did it themselves.....acting out an experience not just "doing a task" (3 different people had to find a specific book in 3 different ways from online to physically hunting it out in the library). that was their starting point for finding the issues...then mapping personas...finding "breakpoints" which drove the design opportunities (very interesting - find that slide too)... But they did everything to provide design principles and how the whole experience maps together....including providing logic of where to put signage....and changing object signs to task oriented (reference desk became "ask a librarian" - intuitive and also gives affordance - you know you're allowed to ask). After the design was finished (you can imagine this was a huge project) they carried out the same scenarios again to see if it worked better. (refer to my continuing beef about use the same tasks across different testing sessions - something we still haven't managed to do).

Just an interesting porject to listen to and some really nice ways to use the different tools. Worth digging around in these slides.