Fixing Bad UX Designs

Lisandra Maioli

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781787128224
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Modelling & Design
• Index: Computer Science

A practical guide filled with case studies and easy solutions to solve the most common user experience issues

Key Features

• Understand and fix the pain points of a bad UX design to ensure greater customer satisfaction.
• Correct UX issues at various stages of a UX Design with the help of different methodologies for fixing bad UXs
• See best practices and established principles in UX with case studies illustrating these practices and principles

Book Description

Have your web applications been experiencing more hits and less conversions? Are bad designs consuming your time and money?This book is the answer to these problems. With intuitive case studies, you'll learn to simplify, fix, and enhance some common, real-world application designs. You'll look at the common issues of simplicity, navigation, appearance, maintenance, and many more.The challenge that most UX designers face is to ensure that the UX is user-friendly. In this book, we address this with individual case studies starting with some common UX applications and then move on to complex applications. Each case study will help you understand the issues faced by a bad UX and teach you to break it down and fix these problems.As we progress, you'll learn about the information architecture, usability testing, iteration, UX refactoring, and many other related features with the help of various case studies. You'll also learn some interesting UX design tools with the projects covered in the book.By the end of the book, you'll be armed with the knowledge to fix bad UX designs and to ensure great customer satisfaction for your applications.

What you will learn

• Learn about ROI and metrics in UX
• Understand the importance of getting stakeholders involved
• Learn through real cases how to fix bad UX
• Identify and fix UX issues using different methodologies
• Learn how to turn insights and finding into practical UX solutions
• Learn to validate, test and measure the UX solutions implemented
• Learn about UX refactoring

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone confronted with a poorly designed UX. It is ideal for UX professionals who want to solve problems with existing UX designs, and UX designers who want to enhance their designs or analyze and rectify where they went wrong.

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Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies

By understanding business and user needs, it will be possible to focus on what exactly should be fixed. It is important to have a clear idea of what the problems are that your UX efforts aim to solve and understand what the solutions are that the company provides.

Keep in mind that anything that is preventing your users from accomplishing the task on your site, app, service, or product will result in a poor experience and will make it difficult for your business to deliver the solutions to your customer.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Understanding UX and Its Importance, a bad user experience can result in serious problems for your business. In this chapter, you will learn how to identify UX issues and understand the project challenges by:

• Identifying who are your stakeholders and their needs
• Identifying who are your users are, and their needs
• Doing competitive comparative analysis
• Understanding the user journey and finding touchpoints
• Defining what are the problems and the project goals/challenges
• Using UX researching/discovering methodologies

Identifying stakeholders and their needs

Identifying the stakeholders and their needs should be one of your tasks. Even if you believe that you already know enough about it, either because you have been working for the company for a while, or because you have already gathered this information in another way, it is always worth revalidating it. The company's strategy may change from time to time, as well as the stakeholders' view of the product or service, which will necessarily impact your design decisions.

"Empathy is a big buzzword in UX right now. There are books and blog posts espousing the idea that if designers can develop true empathy for users, then they'll build better applications. That's true, but what about stakeholders? Designers need to empathise with product owners, business analysts, and even executives too, if they hope to get the support they need for their projects to succeed."

Prioritization map

Another way to identify the stakeholders is to add them in a prioritization map. On the website servicedesigntoolkit.org, you can find a template to help you to organize the stakeholders from the most to the least directly involved:

RACI matrix

The first step will be identifying the stakeholders. The larger the organization and project, the more stakeholders there may be, and the harder they may be to find. A great suggestion is starting from a responsibility assignment matrix, also known as an RACI chart, which is a project management tool to identify who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed:

You can use different formats to build your RACI chart, such as a spreadsheet (probably the easiest format). On the racichart.org page, you can download their template. This is an example of how this would be filled:

You can also add the tasks in detail or adapt the idea to other formats, such as a spreadsheet, for example:

Stakeholder matrix

Another option suggested by the website mindtools.com is a matrix to classify the stakeholders regarding their power over the work that you are doing, and their interest in this work. In other words, it is a graphical tool used in this task is a map with two axes: power (vertical) and interest (horizontal). The purpose of this tool is to identify stakeholders to determine what strategies will be used to manage them. For example, imagine a project redesigning an e-commerce platform, who could be the stakeholders? Add the stakeholders to the map according to the parameters of the analysis that you already did, as in this diagram:

The first step is to look at the Manage Closely box and define who are the people who have high power and high interest in the project. These are the people we must manage closely and that usually involve sponsors, top management, directors, and so on. That is, people who need to be always talking, identifying resistances, and engaging, in order to keep ourselves on the same page regarding expectations and needs for the project's completion.

The second step is to look at the Keep Satisfied chart and identify who has high power and low interest. In this framework, we can include those people who will not participate so actively in the meetings, conversations, and definitions of the project, but must be engaged and satisfied with their definitions and progress, as they have the power to decide whether or not to go forward. We must take special care of them so that there are no unexpected obstacles in the future that might impact delivery.

The third step is to look at the Keep Informed chart, where people with high interest and low power will be. We include in this table the final clients, users, people who will use what is being built in their project and who have the power to influence the stakeholders of the preceding table (Manage Closely).

If something is not agreed and these people are not informed about what is being done in the project, the moment they use it they may be dissatisfied and may communicate this dissatisfication to the members of the preceding table, negatively influencing the future of the product.

Impacting this picture negatively can deconstruct all the good planning done with the Manage Closely table, which can lead to the loss of both frames at once.

The last step is to identify people with low power and low interest who will be in the Monitor box. These people may exhibit some discomfort and resistance and will need to be monitored, but they will not possibly cause a major problem to the project.

Interviewing stakeholders

Now that you have the stakeholders mapped, you should organize interviewing them. Keep in mind that stakeholders can reveal assumptions and knowledge gaps, technical requirements or restrictions, and tacit business/content requirements that can be essential for the project. A document by Oracle about stakeholders interviews focused on UX suggests that we should keep in mind that stakeholders are not substitutes for primary user research, but we should not rule out the importance of talking with them. These interviews will help us to frame our questions for users.

Besides previously knowing each of the stakeholders who will be interviewed, you should prepare a script to guide you. At the very least, have a list of topics to discuss and at the most, have a specific list of questions. It is important to keep in mind that you must be prepared, but it should still feel like a conversation. Consider sending questions or topics in advance. It is important to make the stakeholder more comfortable about the process and allow them to prepare a little. You can use the interview checklist suggested by Kim Goodwin, the author of designing for the Digital Age. The UXApprentice website also has prepared suggestions for questions to ask in the stakeholder interview, which you can find here: uxapprentice.com/resources/stakeholder-interview-template/.

Try to plan at least 45 minutes for each interview. A good suggestion from Ten Guidelines for Stakehol...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• Packt Upsell
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Understanding UX and its Importance
• Identifying UX Issues – UX Methodologies
• Exploring Potential UX Solutions
• Increasing Conversion with UX
• Using UI and Content for Better Communication
• Considering Accessibility As Part of the UX
• Improving Physical Experiences
• Improving IA for Better Navigation
• Prototyping and Validating UX Solutions
• Implementing UX Solutions
• Measuring UX Solutions
• Keeping Up to Date
• Other Books You May Enjoy