Design Concepts

Owned by Gary Thompson (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jun 26, 2014 by Jodie Muramoto (Deactivated)
2 min read

Most design activity starts rough and trails out rapidly in many directions. These design ideas are critiqued, refined, and reiterated, gaining concreteness as it moves forward. The stages are roughly: sketch, wireframe, mockup, and prototype. At each of these stages, it is important to get user feedback as often as makes sense. Early feedback rapidly identifies roadblocks and removes them, ensuring a good user experience and preventing costly change later on. Most important, there is constant review by the user, conforming the design (and the resultant product) to what the user wants.

User Conventions

It is important to consider user conventions when designing. A user convention is something regarded as a normative example. The browser back-button or search are good examples. User conventions have very strong expectations for behavior and breaking a user convention results in user shock, confusion, and error, ultimately leading to abandonment. Conversely, following user conventions increase users' sense of mastery over the website, increase their ability to get things done, and increase their overall satisfaction with the experience. Innovation is needed and to be encouraged, but tread carefully when breaking a user expectation and test often! A good rule of thumb concerning user conventions and innovation is: "Never fail user expectations, but exceed them whenever possible".

Note a distinction, however, that UCD is not a process of simply asking the user what they want and then building that. Very often, a user does not know what they really want and/or cannot articulate their needs in a way that translates to a good user experience. UCD promotes understanding the user and then applying the design craft based on that understanding. Thus a designer utilizing UCD will understand the user, envision a possible solution, and then present that solution to the user for feedback, refining the design through the process. The key is to put the user at the center.

uPortal Design Concepts

Mark design concepts with one or more of the following labels: wireframe, mockup, theme, skin.

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