This is why, for the most part, designers actively use the design sprint methodology in their work. First, the designer begins his design with several stages of empathy, here he gets to know the user better, identifies his pains, and maps the user. Second, he builds wireframes and tests with the user.
Do not forget about it, because this is what the product will be, it is very important to focus on the user. To determine how successful the usability of the site is after you have already finished the design and your product is launched — it is a good idea to conduct a usability test, conduct a survey, view a log analysis and also do AB-testing, if you doubt any of the designs.
But unfortunately, you don’t always have access to users or it can be expensive for the company. So I suggest figuring out how to do the testing and figure out what you need to improve on your site yourself. Let’s do a test and answer a few simple questions.
Let’s take a closer look at which aspects need improvement and identify them using Jacob Nielsen’s 8 principles of heuristics. To do this, we will take a table and divide it into 4 steps, in each step we will prioritize the finding and determine which heuristic it belongs to. Before we start testing, we need to decide on a plan. Which path, or action, we want to test and get into the user’s shoes.
To do this, we will answer the questions:
– Who uses the product?
– What problem does he solve?
– What unique settings can he apply to his search?
“As a pet owner, I want to buy a train ticket with connections in different countries. I need to leave in a week, and I need to buy tickets as soon as possible.”
Now we will consider the priority of each item, this is necessary so that you your team does not have chaos from a large number of notes, for this we will divide into three priorities:
- Unimportant but desirable, we can return to it after all the other tasks are finished
- Of medium importance, the product fulfills the main task, but there are errors on the way
- Is the most important task, the need to eliminate first, the product can not work without eliminating this task
We need to check how easy the site is to use. To do that we should make the same way the user does. For example, we can easily understand where to click to go to the next page or how many steps to take to fill out a form or buy a product. If we find errors while doing the task we record them in our table for a certain section.
Now let’s take a closer look at the heuristics that we will rely on to evaluate the interface:
#1 Correspondence between the system and the real world:
Using terms that are clear and familiar in the writing will help the user complete their task and solve the problem. When the product speaks in professional language, our user may not feel comfortable and may even leave the site. For example a site for beginners and practicing artists in his general articles uses professional jargon, this text will be difficult and perhaps even boring to perceive not everyone can understand the article.
In addition to language, you need to pay attention to the visual part. The design should correspond to the mental models of people. So most often the model of using the product in the web space should not differ from the real world, we try to adopt the interpretation of the real world on the web. For example, we use a switcher on the site to change the dark and light theme like turning a light source on and off.
#2 User control and freedom
Always give the option to go back to a previous step or page, implement the ability to cancel an order, action or setting at any stage. This builds more trust in the product, besides encouraging the user to make additional purchases. If you don’t want to intentionally confuse the user, use the familiar layout of the exit and close overlay buttons. Restricting the user to cancel actions causes feelings of unfreedom and can negatively impact the product experience.
For example, we buy brushes on the site, and navigating through the catalog, being on page 30 we decide to open the product. After reading it via the back button, we go back to the listing on the first page, an unpleasant situation because we have to look through 30 pages again. And after ordering, we can’t change the quantities of the item or change the date of the order. You that it’s so bad
Let’s move on to our table and figure out how to properly fill out our findings. In testing our site for artists, we found that:
We have to make sure that the product is accessible to people of all abilities and, of course, all experience with web products. That is, if my mom, who is not very good at web technology, starts using this product, it should be easy for her, ordering products home. We also need to consider the possibility that people with disabilities can easily watch videos, for example, Netflix has built in additional translation for the visually impaired, the narrator tells you what happens in different scenes of the movie. And YouTube has long ago built in the ability to support subtitles in different languages.
#3 Flexibility and efficiency of use
Any system should be able to be accessible to people of different skill levels. And this means that when designing an interface we think about the fact that newbies often need onboarding, hints, or clear and obvious options for how the system works. So beginners rely on instructions and step-by-step actions.
We also have to keep regular users in mind, so that we don’t slow them down with prompts or onboarding, we design a faster way for experienced users, such as adding keyboard shortcuts to perform a function, or adding gestures to overcome sequential and lengthy navigation.
When the system is flexible the user can customize it and perform tasks in different ways based on their work style. We as UX designers have to provide different possibilities of customization. For example, the well-known program photoshop, when you load it up for the first time, shows you a tooltip for different tools. As a power user you can close it and keep on working, but if you want more information you can open the onboarding. Or you can use keyboard shortcuts to save or open a filter, while beginners will navigate through the menu to find the function.
#4 Inclusiveness, person-centeredness
Designing an inclusive interface, the designer focuses on the different abilities of the user. We work with different user groups, and they speak different languages, may have different disabilities, hearing loss, vision, color vision abnormalities, and even motor abilities. So it is important to provide an experience that takes into account the differences in physical abilities. Allow the user to describe himself as he wants without limiting him, this could be gender, age, race, origin and language.
Testing the interface on user groups should take into account and select respondents with different opinions, highlight quotations, not be biased and strive to show what people really are and not a simplified model.
Well, let’s move on to our table, let’s see what points I highlighted in the test site buying tickets:
We as UI/UX designers create a product that reflects what creates a positive and friendly connection with it. Beautiful design complements and enhances the experience. So it’s worth asking the design questions — whether it’s fun to navigate the site, how good the product photos are, how interesting the key image of the site is. This helps the user make a choice, make a connection with the brand
#5 Aesthetic and minimalist design
It is not necessary to load the cognitive abilities of the user, a lot of information, icons, colors, different illustrations. Each particle in the interface fights for the user’s attention, especially if we consider a complex interface such as a program for processing audio or video, there is a large number of controls, various controls and menus, which greatly complicate the task of visual search.
For example, using a step-by-step menu expansion for rare menu categories helps the user reduce the cognitive load. And controlling the visual part, such as not using a repeating icon in long lists that doesn’t make much sense, will help reduce space and bring order to the interface. Visual elements such as: graphics, photos or animations support, communicate and guide the user to the goal, not decorate the interface.
#6 Error recognition, diagnosis and troubleshooting
The interface should give direct and clear constructive advice on how to fix the error. Because it is at the moment of error, users are more motivated when they need to recover from an error, if you miss this moment the opportunity to increase learnability can be missed.
Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the simplicity of language, and this requires a good knowledge of your audience, choose familiar words, terms, this will help you quickly understand the text and take action. It is not recommended to use slang, idioms or any professional terms.
The usefulness of a product is also very important because it solves the user’s problems. The difference between a useful product and a usable product is that the product works well and is easy to use, and usability refers to the ability to solve user problems. The questions that need to be asked are whether the design solves the user’s problems, whether the design helps achieve a certain goal. If we were evaluating the usefulness of the design of an airline ticketing app, a useful aspect would be that the user can easily pick up and buy a ticket in one app without leaving home or visiting third-party resources
#7 Reference and Documentation
It’s not unusual that users are coming across an unknown application and don’t understand what steps they need to take to reach their goal. Some products prefer to show a long onboarding at the beginning or even worse a huge manual which is stored somewhere in the depths of the product and cannot be found using a search engine.
We must understand that users don’t like and are reluctant to read any instructions and often ignore them, because they want to get to work quickly and solve the problem. To avoid overloading the user with a lot of information that he is unlikely to remember, it is recommended to give him tips in portions and in the context of some action.
For example tips in context can be a tooltip with the description of the tool that appears when you put the cursor on it.
If you intend to use technical documentation, the description of the instructions should be clear, divided into appropriate sections, numbered lists, and have a clear visual hierarchy because at the moment of getting to the page of instructions users are in a hurry and they do not have time to penetrate into the structure of support.
#8 Error recognition, diagnosis and troubleshooting
The interface should give direct and clear constructive advice on how to fix the error. Because it is at the moment of error, users are more motivated when they need to recover from an error, if you lose this moment the opportunity to increase learnability can be missed.
That is why it is important to pay attention to the simplicity of language, and this requires a good knowledge of your audience, choose familiar words, terms, this will help the user to quickly understand the text and take action. It is not recommended to use slang, idioms or any professional termsГ
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