[MUSIC] Welcome to Introduction to User Experience Design. Today I will discuss how to develop design alternatives where our goal is to improve the user experience. In the requirement gathering phase, phase 1, we were able to identify the problem space. That is, we collect the data to understand all the possible places we can improve the user experience. The idea of a problem space can be vague, so I'm going to work with an example from a course I recently taught. Students in my class were tasked with coming up with new user experiences that would get users to get to know their neighbor. The problem space is huge. It requires that the designer consider who is the neighbor? What is a neighborhood? How would you answer these questions? Jot your answers down and see if you come up with some of the same responses. The goal of the alternative design phase is to develop interfaces or systems to do a better job of meeting the needs of the user than their existing practices. In particular, our job is to hone in on what problems we want to solve. This is the design space.. Here is a list that reflects how students in my class narrow it in on the Design Space. They decided that neighbors and neighborhood included people in apartment buildings, in a residential block, business travelers visiting a new town or city, students on campus or in class or at the gym. In the previous lessons, I stated that as designers we work in an ecosystem. In choosing the design space, our designs impact the individual, group and society. As designers we have preferences, we have aesthetic sensibilities and these will driver the design space we choose. Think about an example I just presented or think about the example I just presented. The fact that this was a group of student designers led many of them to choose design spaces that centered around the college experience. Living on campus, attending classes, recreational activities. It's fine for designers to choose different areas of the problem space to concentrate their effort. However, it's imperative to remember that we have a road map that requires that our designs are useful and usable. By useful I mean that the phase one data shows that these designs will improve the user's ability to complete their task. By usable I mean, that our novel designs are grounded in the functional and non functional requirements we identified in phase one. This will lead the user to complete the task with improved effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Thus improving their user experience. The primary task of designing alternatives, to use your screen practices is to conceptualize the design base. Here we review the data from phase one and identify what the user is saving they need, right. They say this explicitly and what we can implicitly gather from phase one data. Once again, we have the designer as detective. Here is an abridged version of the results from my class phase one findings. For the team that chose campus life as their design space, the users told them via interviews and questionnaires that they wished they knew more people in class, they had no sense of what the daily special events were on campus. They had a hard time finding a place to study on campus and they had to walk around buildings trying to find an open room. And when they were asked to rank the most important activities, they rank academics being their first priority. Then social events, then staying safe on campus. The team also derived a set of implicit needs from their explicit findings. They focused on the data that indicated that academics were the user's primary concern in college. In this case, it would mean that doing well in their courses is important, which in turn means getting the best grades possible. The explicit goal of meeting more people from courses can lead to implicit need. We want to know who else is studying for the same exam, and this can also derive that we may need to find a place to meet people or to meet people we want to study with at the same time. Data from phase one also allows us to figure out the functional and non functional requirements for our design alternatives. Functional requirements are those things that the system should do. These are based on the expected functioning of the system. Non-functional requirements on the other hand relate to constraints on the system and its development. They can also be considered quality attributes. They include many backend functions such as security, performance, maintainability. But they can also include front-end or usability features, such as layout or flow, or maybe even language localization requirements, for example, that the spelling bee in American English versus British English, or vice-versa. You can find comprehensive lists of functional and non-functional requirements online. Going back to my example from class, one team decided to design a study session organizer. A functional requirement for this system might be that it allows students to enter multiple classes that they want to study for, and the various times that they're free and available to study. While nonfunctional requirements might include encryption standards and a security function that automatically verified that the student ID number was actually valid. In the class I teach on campus, user experience design is a project based class and each group is made up of four or five students. I usually lead a number of exercises where I get students to individually come up with implicit and explicit needs based on phase one data and then I get them to come back together as a group. Another important technique for group designers is brainstorming exercises. These have the advantages that individual characteristics of the student/designer also impact the needs that are identified. In brainstorming, the most important rule is to be open minded and not to dismiss any ideas. Affinity diagrams can be used to help streamline brainstorming data. Here's a typical method. So what you have is you have the designer or the designer and various stakeholders are just the stakeholders by themselves, write down ideas on individual sticky notes. The designers then take all these sticky notes and organize them according to something they have in common, some typical concept that's guiding them. The designers then decide on what interface or interfaces can meet all of the functional requirements in one category or across a set of similar categories. Now we're tasked with finding an interface for our new system. Carrying the example from class forward, we want to consider, what would a good interface be for our new study session organizer? Take a minute to jot down some ideas. If you're like many of my students you've come across the golden triangle. You went for the phone app, the website and the kiosk. But there are so many other options. Sharp and colleagues provide a great figure in their 2007 book. Where they list 20 different types of interfaces. I often get students to consider how they can improve their user experience by picking something outside the magic triangle. So what novel interface would you pick? Which futuristic one or which fun one might you use to develop this new study organizing system? This concludes our module on developing alternative design. At this point, I will remind you that although I have listed these steps separately, they are necessarily inter-related. This will become apparent in the next module where we consider techniques to bring our designs to life, phase three where we will actually prototype our designs. [MUSIC]
