During this course you will learn how to research the circumstances and needs of different types of users, to design and prototype interactive products that are both usable and useful.
In particular, you will get familiar with:
- User eXperience (UX) design principles and patterns
- Qualitative and quantitative user research
- Competitor analysis
- User personas, user stories and user journey maps
- Interface design: paper-prototyping and wireframing
- Rapid prototyping tools
- User-testing: face2face, A/B testing and analytics
- Motivational copy-writing for stickiness
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This course is NOT about honing your coding skills.
Whilst you are welcome to prototype your ideas using HTML+CSS+JS, there are many tools that will get you to similar results without touching code (or very little of it).
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This course is not about Photoshop or Illustrator wizardry.
You will be introduced to several tools that enable you to wireframe and prototype user interfaces quickly and effectively.
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In this course Lorem ipsum is banned.
If a Web product aims to deliver valuable content and facilitate meaningful interactions, we should be designing content-first for the best possible UX.
Lorem ipsum is gibberish that conveniently fills the available space like an expanding gas. It is inert, meaningless and lacks context, revealing nothing about the relationship between your design and your content.
Using Lorem ipsum is a missed opportunity to do good UX design.
| When | In class | Homework | Blog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday 08.01 |
Intro to the brief Intro to UX Team project kickstart: NMM_hidden_histories Tour of existing interactives at NMM / Round 1 competitor analysis Customer discovery interviews at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (aka NMM) |
Competitor analysis round 2 | Interviewing humans |
| Monday 15.01 |
Lightning talk: digital projects in museums Ideation Elevator pitch Concept one-pager |
Interviews round 2 Wireframes (aka paper prototypes) |
Learning to wireframe |
| Monday 22.01 |
Lightning talk: the UX design process Experience map Digital prototypes v1 |
Prototyping | Inspiring museum interactives |
| Monday 29.01 |
TBC | TBC | TBC |
| Monday 05.02 |
Tutorials Formative presentations @ NMM |
User personas | Formative feedback action plan |
| Enchantment Week | |||
| Monday 19.02 |
Prototyping workshop | Concept video | Telling the story of your project / research |
| Monday 26.02 |
Tutorials User-testing @ NMM |
User-testing report | TBC |
| Monday 05.03 |
Formative presentation 2 @ NMM | Hand-in on Moodle |
NMM Hidden Histories
On this team project you will learn the methods and tools of user research and iterative design, by working on a real-world project for the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich.
All the project material is here.
For formative, each group will produce a pitch for a design concept that will be presented at the National Maritime Museum to tutors, peers and industry.
This will be followed by at Moodle upload of the presentation by 16.00pm the same day.
For Formative Presentation 2 your teams will develop the formative pitch into an appropriate working prototype along with evidance of all parts of the industry brief.
For formative upload 2, an accompanying hand-in package for this prototype and supporting course work must be uploaded by 16.00pm to the indicated section on Moodle.
You will be expect to hand in: A MarkDown document (where Name is your own name and Surname is your own surname, like WEB14204-Freya-Smith.md).
In that MarkDown document, you should include the following:
• Competitor analysis
• Elevator pitch
• Concept one-pager
• Experience map
• Formative presentation
• User personas
• Wireframes
• Prototype(s)
• Concept video
• User-testing report
• Formative presentation 2
These matterials should support your prototype, supplied on a link within the document.
The second formative hand-in should also be accompanied by a list of links to weekly blog posts.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative user research and be familiar with a few techniques to perform both types of research.
- Research and analyse competitor services to gain inspiration and insight from them.
- Identify and use design patterns effectively in your projects.
- Produce user personas, user stories and user journey maps to communicate and validate your design decisions.
- Understand the importance of motivational copy-writing in interface design, and write interface copy that is appropriate for your audience and their task(s) at hand.
- Use paper-prototyping and wireframing techniques to visualise your interface design ideas and explore alternative solutions.
- Use rapid prototyping tools to quickly test solutions to specific UX problems.
- Understand the differences between various user-testing methods and practice them at a basic level.
- Document your design and development process, from the exploration of ideas to their practical implementation. Including successes and failures.
- Communicate your ideas both technically and in an engaging way.
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Be present. If you happen to be late (even by 5 minutes) or absent, make sure you email me about it before a session starts.
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Participate in class debates and workshops. We'll make sure that your ideas have space to be heard and that nobody makes you feel uncomfortable about sharing them.
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Present your work during formative and summative assessments. If you can't make it in on one of those days then you should let me know 2 weeks in advance and we'll arrange an earlier pitch date to present.
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Be responsible for what happens in class. Organise with your peers to get class information and material that you may have missed.
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Meet the deadlines. If you submit your work after a deadline, your grade will be effected. Please read the Unit brief for details.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
