webinar "Intro To User Experience Design:

Rethinking the Design Process".

Today, I am happy to introduce to you one of

the Cardinal Path UX team members,

also known as a major force in the

Cardinal Path design team, Mike Jones.

Mike is based out of our Phoenix

office where he works closely with

both internal teams and with clients to ensure striking and,

more importantly, effective design.

For those of you who have not attended a

Cardinal Path webinar yet,

though looking through the attendee list

it looks like most of you have,

my name is Kent

and I will be sitting in on this presentation and taking

any questions asked in the GoToMeeting's

question pane in the

overall GoToMeeting panel.

Then, at the end of this webinar,

I will feed these back to Mike

and we will see if we can answer as

many of them as we can.

So, without further ado... Mike

take this away.

MIKE: Hi everybody, this is Mike Jones.

We'll be doing an intro to user experience design

webinar this morning

hopefully you guys find it

helpful

and engaging.

uh

Real quick, just a couple of

things about me.

As Kent already mentioned, I'm a UX

and user interface designer here at Cardinal Path.

Those are some of my contact handles

if you want to reach out to me after the webinar,

that would be awesome and I can answer any

further questions you guys might have.

There will be another slide at

the end so you guys can get that info.

So, we'll jump right in.

Three main things we are going to cover today are:

What is user experience, or UX

and why should we care?

Secondly is

websites and UX.

So, how does user experience

deal with websites and website design.

And finally, breaking down UX into five planes.

We will get into that in a little bit.

We'll start with "What is User Experience?"

Or UX.

As you'll see in the industry,

UX is generally the term or the

acronym you'll see most for "User Experience".

So, what is user experience?

Seems like everyone is throwing this

word around right now, I see it

all over

blogs, and not just design blogs,

but also

blogs centered around

business and start ups

centered around

big companies like Apple.

Apple's been a huge

force in bringing

user experience to the

forefront of business.

But what is it?

What the heck is this term

people are throwing around?

I thought

a good place to start is the

all-knowing Wikipedia.

Because they're the source

of everything useful.

</sarcasm>

But actually, in this case,

it's pretty relevant.

I thought their explanation, they're

synopsis of User Experience was really helpful.

Basically, they said,

"User Experience, or UX,

is the way a person

feels about using a product,

system or service."

I think that sums it up

pretty well.

So,

basically,

what we want to say

user experience is

is "UX equals Feelings".

How people feel about

using whatever it is you are putting in front of them.

Let's break this down a little bit.

before we jump into

the design of UX.

I want to make sure we understand

user experience and what goes into that.

First up is

let's break down a user.

Ultimately, a user is a person.

So, it's a real human being.

They have

dreams

They have goals.

They have thoughts and desires.

And ultimately, when they

use something they're

generally doing it with

something in mind that

they want to accomplish at the end of it.

Whether that's a product,

or a website

or some service that you provide,

that has a user at some level.

And these users

are people, so they're

emotional, they have feelings.

And ultimately, it's these

feelings about your product that

become the user experience.

Everyday we make decisions,

based on how we feel.

So, the decisions that people make

about your product

or the final conclusion

they make about your website

are generally based on what they feel

and not so much

based on

what we like to think of as

the very logical steps of

did they accomplish exactly what

they were looking to do.

That's a big part of it

but

ultimately, it's feelings and emotions that

build that user experience.

And finally,

it's about experience,

it's about using something.

Ultimately, it's about accomplishing a goal.

So, when we talk about users

who have feelings,

when they're using something like

your product or your service,

ultimately,

they're trying to accomplish something

at the end of that.

So, we'll talk more about that in a minute.

A great example is

making a phone call

and making a reservation at a restaurant.

So, the user in this case is

someone making a phone call.

And ultimately their goal or their desire is to

book a reservation.

But there's a lot of things that

go into that experience, such as:

the phone they're using,

or

how the person answers the call

on the other end,

and then that whole conversation,

that experience with that other person,

all comes together to build the user experience.

All in the blink of,

you know, 5 minutes at the most.

Another example might be

a day trader, someone who trades stock all day.

A lot of these people do that online

and

they're using a system

that's built. They're using a

product that's built

for doing just that.

And they're using it all day, so

8, 10, maybe even 16 hours a day,

they're sitting in front of a computer,

trading stocks.

What kind of user experience are they

building over that

8, 10, 16 hour block of time?

That's a lot of time to be using

a system or a product

and so, over the course of that amount of time they're

building up a lot of emotion about it.

Either they're building a lot of positive emotion

or they're building a lot of negative emotion

as they continue to run into

frustrations or

hiccups or

things that they just

don't really like.

So, I want to kind of give a little

example of user experience

and a little story.

So, this is a story about getting a flat tire.

So, you're going to put yourself

in someone else's shoes

for just a moment.

So, pretend that you have

a big presentation at work.

and you really want to "Wow"

your boss and the client.

And so you

you get up early, you get ready,

you jump in the car,

in this case you have

a car and will drive to work,

so, you're not mass commuting

and saving the environment

and all that fun stuff.

So, you're going to hop into your car

and drive to work.

And on your way there, you get a flat tire.

And

the great thing about

getting a flat tire this day is you

have never changed a flat tire in your life.

So, you've never done it before,

don't really know how it works,

maybe understand a bit of the gist but

for the most part, you're pretty clueless.

So, you do what everybody does,

you grab the owner's manual, right?

And, you open it up

and you find the index and you look up,

"How to change my tire."

And there are some instructions in there about

where to put the jack and how to do it, so you

grab everything out of the trunk and

you get the jack set up and do everything.

And as you are jacking the car up

it doesn't work,

and the car actually falls

and it falls on the jack weird and

it breaks something.

The next thing you know, you're sitting

3 hours on the side of the road

waiting for a tow truck

He's got to tow your car,

find out you've got hundreds of dollars in repairs,

you've lost all this time,

you missed your big presentation,

and you're really frustrated.

All because

the owner's manual

told you to do something that wasn't right

for that car.

So, what do you do?

You're obviously really frustrated and angry.

And you pretty much make

a decision you're never going to

buy a car of that brand ever again.

And don't use the Honda example in the picture

as gospel here, I'm a huge Honda fan,

So, not saying this happened to me or

this is a problem with Honda's [EVIL LAUGH]

just, it was an easy image to grab.

But not only are you frustrated about

brands, but you also go and tell

all your friends about your

horrible experience you had.

And you tell them about how

when you opened up the owner's manual,

it told you one thing,

and it totally didn't work.

and even though you were inexperienced,

and you never changed a tire before,

you expected the owner's manual to tell you what to do.

And you expected it to tell you what to do

in a way that would protect your car.

And not only did you tell all your friends,

you decided to go online

go to a couple forums,

go to a couple review sites,