Interactions Made Clean
There are steps to creating a good design, that functions properly and looks uncluttered. You have to make important moves before you can actually put your work in front of someone and ask them to use it. There are so many things to consider before you can call your design finished. At first all these steps seemed irrelevant but in the end, it’s the big picture that helped me understand why each individual step is vital. Since taking the class DGM 2240, I have created my own process of each one of these steps, that creates a good design interaction.
1. Define and Research
Learn who your client is, and then learn who the audience is. Start out with learning who you are working for, because that way you understand what the end product should look like and what needs to be included. Get in the mind of how they want their users to see their product.
We interviewed our stakeholder, who wanted to create an “Uber for Housecleaning”. This seemed pretty straightforward because everyone knew what Uber was. Our goal was to figure out how to make it very different from Uber so that people would know our brand like they know theirs. We had to ask different questions for different categories such as, the start of the idea, their need or problem they are trying to solve, goals, etc.
Now that you understand your client, look at the audience’s side. Understand them and ask yourself the very important questions. Who? What? When? Why? And How? If you can answer these questions after your research is over, then you are one step closer.
We created interview questions to ask potential users, and we teamed up to ask those questions. This was an important beginning to know what our user’s would want in an app such as this. There wasn’t just one side to it either, there was the side of those who wanted to hire a cleaner, and the side of those who wanted to be the cleaner.
2. Analyze
Personas and scenarios go hand-in-hand. We created fictional people that could be potential users. This gets us into the mindset of understanding their demographic, where they come from, why they would ever end up using our app.
Scenarios help us figure out what our user’s will need in our design. We put the persona we created, and make up a reason why they would come to our client’s. Think of different things they would need in order to use our app efficiently and get everything they need out of it.
3. Design
Now to the fun part! There are a few steps to the actual designing portion of our whole process. We want to create a site map to find out what we need and how it will flow.
Sketching is next, we always need to come up with different ideas and versions. We’ll take our ideas we had in the research step and incorporate them in our sketches. Ideas come to life and we start seeing it in real form. This is important for the next step because it’s easier to change things on paper.
Wireframes are simple and straight forward. They give us structure to understand where our content will fit. Which then, we’ll want to create what we call, High Surface Compositions. We will add our images, any wording, and our color scheme.
4. Testing
While every step in our design process is important, user testing is one of the key steps. It’s so important you find out if your design is going to benefit your client and user’s needs. We gather people who would be potential users, from all different demographics.
During the testing process, we like to ask them a few questions about them. Then we’ll give them objectives, and as they go through our product, we’ll time each objective. We do this to see if our design is functional and friendly for all different people.
Once our testing has been completed, we ask for any and all feedback. From what they give us, we’ll change the design as needed.
Now you know why all these steps are important for a clean, user friendly interaction. Everything you do in this process comes down to the end product and if it’s not done thoroughly, you’ll end up within someone who can’t use your product and end up like this…
You can read my full Design Process here.
Jade Longhurst is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to DGM 2240 course and representative of the skills learned.
