Venturing into User Experience design

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:26:00 -0500

Recently I have been diving into user experience design at work. We have an ever evolving and improving product that needed some UX attention. In this I have found a couple of things I wanted to share.

I found it difficult for myself to deal with designing the new user interface while also prototyping new functionality. Once I was able to first prototype the existing functionality it was easier to come up with the new design. The key here was to come up with a design to handle existing that was flexible enough to handle anything new that the business may want to add.
Start with sketches. I went out and purchased Balsamiq. I tried working with this at first to prototype quickly but I found that there is nothing better than a pencil and paper for initial creativity. In the future I am going to start with pencil sketches then move them into Balsamiq to show the business before moving them into comps.
I have been programming for over 10 years now and in the past 4 months my wrists have started to break down when I use a mouse. So I have ended up buying a bunch of different keyboards, mice and track pads to alleviate the pain. The problem here is that creating comps in Photoshop is difficult to do without the use of a precision input devise like a mouse. I ended up doing very little design work in Photoshop and decided to skip that step and move directly into HTML and CSS. While I am not able to produce the comps as fast as just dragging some layers around in Photoshop. I was able to create a HTML template that we can pick up at the end of the UX process to use in the application. I am not sure if this is a time saver in the long run; but it sure makes my wrists feel a lot better.

For this venture I have used the following resources.

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action
Designing the Moment DVD (Perfect 1hr DVD-ROM for the business to understand user interface)

John Blayter - User Experience

Venturing into User Experience design