User Experience Design

Why Should You Care?

Almost every successful consumer internet company in the last few years has had a designer founder (AirBnb, Path, Fab, Pinterest, Square, Vimeo, Tumblr, etc…)

Good design is now table stakes for consumer, and increasingly important for enterprise.

“User experience design isn’t a checkbox. You don’t do it and move on. It needs to be integrated into everything you do.”-Liz DanzicoChair, Visual School for the Arts

What makes good design?

Strategic Sweet Spot

The Process

Where UX Fits

Artifact Creation

• High-level process flow• Wireframe sketches (low fidelity)• Balsamic wireframes (medium fidelity)• Clickable wireframes (high fidelity)• Visual design and branding

• Test with users at every step!

Data Driven Design

• Track clicks, flows, user retention (Mixpanel, Google Analytics)

• Multi-variate testing (Google Website Optimizer)

• Lean/Agile UX– Must find the right mix of traditional

design/ideation, and releasing early and often for market validation

Designer Recruiting

• Is becoming harder…• Everyone is starting to realize that designers

are in demand• Designers tend to be paid less and get less

respect than developers• Look for portfolios that involve both UX and

visual design• Ask UX-focused interview questions

Design Outsourcing

• Works well for visual design• Outsourcing user experience design is only going to

work if– The UX flow is uncomplicated and well understood – not

treading new ground– The firm has more experience in a particular segment than

the feature team – though this can backfire– The requirements have little to no ambiguity

• But… sometimes high end UX-design consulting firms (like Adaptive Path) can solve troublesome problems that feature teams can’t

Some Perspective

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVb8EC1Y2xM

http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com/