UX for Beginners

Chapter 2. The Five Main Ingredients of UX

User Experience design is a process, and these lessons roughly follow that process, but you should always keep these five things in mind: Psychology, Usability, Design, Copywriting, and Analysis.

Any one of these five ingredients could be a book of its own, so I will be oversimplifying a bit. This is supposed to be a crash course, not Wikipedia.

Although, to be fair, I’m pretty sure Wikipedia’s UX page was written by a guy who heard about UX once... at that thing... that time...

1. Psychology

   A user’s mind is complex. You should know; you have one, (I assume). UXers work with subjective thoughts and feelings a lot; they can make or break your results. And the designer must ignore their own psychology sometimes, too, and that’s hard!

   Ask yourself:

   • What is the user’s motivation to be here in the first place?

   • How does this make them feel?

   • How much work does the user have to do to get what they want?

   • What habits are created if they do this over and over?

   • What do they expect when they click this?

   • Are you assuming they know something that they haven’t learned yet?

   • Is this something they want to do again? Why? How often?

   • Are you thinking of the user’s wants and needs, or your own?

   • How are you rewarding good behavior?

2. Usability

   If user psychology is mostly subconscious, usability is mostly conscious. You know when something is confusing. There are cases where it is more fun if something is hard—like a game—but for everything else, we want it to be so easy that even ...