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User Experience Design (UX) is a broad, holistic science that combines many cognitive and brain sciences disciplines like psychology and sociology, content strategies, and arts and aesthetics by following human-center approaches.
Human-centred design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and applying human factors/ergonomics and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility, sustainability, and counteracts possible adverse effects on human health, safety, and performance. HCDSociety
- UX disciplines
- Design thinking process
- Designing software
- Tools and Resources
The principles and indications taught by interaction-design.org can be useful in the process of creating research software.
The main UX disciplines are:
- User research: understanding the people who use a product or system through observations.
- Information architecture: identifying and organizing information within a system in a purposeful and meaningful way.
- Interaction design: designing a product or system's interactive behaviors with a specific focus on their use.
- Usability evaluation: measuring the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a product or system.
- Accessibility evaluation: measuring the quality of a product or system to be accessed irrespective of personal abilities and device properties.
- Visual design: designing the visual attributes of a product or system in an aesthetically pleasing way.
The known UX umbrella diagram represents the different disciplines of UX:
Author/Copyright holder: J.G. Gonzalez and The Netherlands eScience Center. Copyright: Apache License 2.0
Design thinking is an approach, mindset, or ideology for product development. According to the IxF(Interaction Design Foundation, Design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time:
- It is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users.
- It leverages the collective expertise and establishes a shared language and buy-in amongst your team.
- It encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
You can find more information about Design Thinking on the IxF page.
Heuristics, or commonly known 'as the rule of thumb,' play a significant role when users interact with software. The Nielsen/Norman group has a top 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to consider when developing software.
When delivering software iteratively, one of the common approaches to follow is to define a Minimum Value Product that contains the minimum requirements. Often is forgotten in this approach to deliver software that attracts and engages the users. When developing research software, researchers should present the new and innovative outcomes in a way that feels comfortable and easy to use from the very beginning, eliminating any cognitive burden that the software's interaction may include.
Author/Copyright holder: J.G. Gonzalez and The Netherlands eScience Center. Copyright: Apache License 2.0
While MVP (Minumun Product Value) focuses on provide users with a way to explore the product and understand its main intent, MLP (Minimun Loveable Product) approach focuses on essential features instead of the bare minimum expected from a class software. Going beyond the bare functionality, the attention is driven towards a great user experience. The outcomes mush contains all elements in the pyramid being functional, reliable, usable, and pleasurable.
Design tools used for Visual Design, Prototyping, and IxD testing collaborative, real-time, online, and multiplatform.