User Experience Design for Non-Designers

Concept Ideation is something that happens right from the starting of the project, quickly iterate and develop a lot of ideas, very quick and very cheap. How do we do that.. thru by Sketching. The power of sketching is that everyone can do it. Sketching is almost as fast as you.

Once we have an idea of where we want to go, we move in to Interaction Design. take in one or two concepts and flush them out end to end. There are few ways to do this;

• Site map/user paths
  
• Application wireframes
  
• Interaction wireframes
  

Once we have our wireframes, and we have our concept we like, we are happy with it and our users are happy with it, now we getting to the Visual Design phase. We build composites to show how the actual application looks when its finally ready and deployed in an environment.

We can pick and chose key wireframes where the visual design really effects, how users may interact, and how the visual design affects the emotions/feelings that the application gives you.

And finally, we step into Production where we stop iterating, the developer starts coding, and we starts producing assets, such as GUI produces images, animations, icons, sounds and so on.

When we are done developing, and users starts interacting the application, we get into Polish phase, where we start to see things that we didn’t see earlier. This is something like the second phase of development.

The conclusion is that there are 3 things to remember;

• Start designing if you have not.
• Design early.
• Iterate often since very rare we get it at the 1st time.

Stolen from Shawn Konopinsky’s presentation, MIX09-C30M - User Experience Design for Non-Designers.