Technology is absolutely booming as an industry. Startups are popping up left and right. New tech is constantly being developed and improved upon. So you wanna get on this tech train? Join the queue.
But before you can launch the next wildly successful app, before you can even start coding it, you need to design it, and designing is lot more work than it looks, and is even harder to do it right. I’m going to show you the most important lessons I’ve learned while designing a product under Iris Howley (PhD)‘s HCI class.
Stop thinking about solutions
That’s right. Stop thinking about solutions. At least, don’t think about them right off the bat. You may be asking, “how am I supposed to design a product to solve some problem without thinking of a solution?” And to that I say, “how are you going to find a good solution if you don’t have a good problem to solve?”
Answer? You can’t.
The first thing you need to do is find a good problem to solve, which is more involved than you would think. The first steps we took while designing our product were to continuously revise our project proposals, first with individual proposals, then with group proposals, to get a general sense of the area we wanted to work in.
After we found our main subject of interest, we narrowed it down to specific issues within that area that needed solving through interviewing users in that sphere and conducting contextual inquiries. Once we gathered all the problems users seemed to be having, we constructed an affinity diagram to group them together and find natural connections between the issues. These groupings helped us brainstorm exactly what tasks our product needed to do in order to address these issues. It was only then that we could begin to think about designing a solution.
If you start thinking about solutions too early, you end up boxing yourself into solving that one problem, which might not even be a very good problem. So conduct your contextual inquiries and interviews, review what you’ve learned from them with an affinity diagram, and then develop the tasks you need your product to support in order to solve these issues.
The users are always right
Drill that into your brain. This is the most important part, in my opinion, of making a good design.
If your usability testers say that they couldn’t figure out how to complete a task, that means your design wasn’t able to match their conceptual model of the task and it needs to be adjusted. If your heuristic evaluators tell you that you broke a heuristic, you broke a heuristic. If your testers say that the name of a button doesn’t make sense and is ugly, it doesn’t make sense and it’s ugly. The users are always right.
Reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman really shone a light on how bad design can lead to users feeling frustrated or stupid, when in actuality, the product not functioning as expected is not their fault, but the designer’s. As the designer, it would be great if everyone could read your mind or instantly know how to work your product at first sight, but real people don’t work like that, and real people are who we are designing for.
Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings!
As you design your product, from start to finish you will generate lots and lots of ideas, some good, some bad, some meh. Some of these ideas will become your babies, either because you came up with them or you worked to revise them several times or just because you thought it was a really good idea. However, recall the previous point. The user is always right. If your users can’t understand your idea, you should revise it so that they can, or get rid of it.
Other times, you may realize there is a better way to organize your product such that the information architechture of your product is easier for your users to undertand and navigate, but will require completely reworking some details or potentially getting rid of them. Again, you should go with the new and improved design because your users come first. Kill those darlings, you can always make better ones later.
Don’t be evil
Google’s early slogan really should apply to everyone’s everyday life, but it especially applies to designing products where the designers have a lot of power over their user base.
Being an ethical designer means taking care of your stake holders and especially your users. You have a responsibility to protect your users from harm that could come from your product. Think about how your app could be misused, then add protective measures to prevent that. For instance, the app we designed had a report function for any events that seemed sketchy or dangerous. Our app also asks users to input their likes and dislikes, as well as integrates with their personal calender. That’s a lot of personal information. However, we have no plans of using this information for anything else than the app’s main purpose of finding events for our users. There is also no way for anyone else to gain access to this information unless the user willingly shares.
There have been many cases where a lack of ethical integrity has cost users’ lives. As the designer, it is your responsibility to prevent that from happening. In general, you should address potential biases in your product, protect your users’ information, and take care of the wellbeing of the people working with your product. The signal code provides a great outline of users’ rights to information, privacy, and data that can be incorporated into ethical designing.
Rated E for Everyone
Your product should be able to be used by everyone in your user base. Think about barriers to use when designing for accessibility.
When we were designing our app, we knew from our contextual inquiries that a portion of our user base would be older indivuduals that were not too good with technology. Therefore, we chose to have our app be very simple in its aesthetic and function, so that people unfamiliar with mobile apps could use it without getting confused. Thoughout our design process, we added more information to each page so that anyone who is unfamiliar with an interface feature can easily figure out how to use it (grey text describing how to use a text box, help buttons for more sophisticated tasks).
For our users who are using a reader to navigate and use our product, we make sure to display the most important information about each event first in the listings. That way, users can listen to the just name of the event, the time, the date, and the location before deciding if they want to listen to a longer description of the event. This also makes it more efficient for our seeing users to navigate events as well, since they can easily skim the events for ones that match their availabilities first.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
If more than one person is going to use your product, you need to test it with more than one person, prefereably as many people as you can. Keep this group diverse so that you can uncover any biases in your design or find design flaws that certain subgroups can navigate but others cannot. Your design should cater to your entire user base, and in order to find out if it does, you need to test and fix your product with a big enough sample population to represent the whole thing.
There are many tests you can do in user experience research. The most obvious of them is the usability test where you can let your users try completing a task on a prototype of your product. Take notes on where they struggled and what they assumed wrongly about the interface. These will guide you as you make your revisions to your prototype.
I highly recommend starting with a paper prototype because of all the changes you will find yourself making throughout this testing product (remember, the user is always right)! Paper prototypes are cheaper and easier to make and edit, making for great initial testing prototypes when you don’t know if your interface matches users’ conceptual models or if it provides enough information to be navigated.
Conclusion
Remember, the design process is work that needs to be done. You won’t magically find the perfect problem to solve. Your design issues won’t resolve themselves. So if you have an idea in mind, go out there and start designing.