User Experience

UX is the experience that a user has with the whole of a system, Including:

• Choosing the product
• Acquiring the product
• Using the product
• Buying the product (micro purchases, fremium modal, remove adds, etc)
• Learning to use the product
• Fixing/troubleshooting the product
• Getting help
• Upgrading the product
• Removing the product

every action to do with your product is part of and important to the user experience

It seems so simple, but it's not; why not?
You the designer or developer or pm are not the user, and if you are a user, you are not all the users; to really understand your user experience you have to go out and observe your users. What makes sense to computers and seasoned computer users isn't always intuitive to regular users. As software evolves and features are added an app that started as simple can grow in complexity very quickly if it's upgrades are not thought out.

Iterative prototyping process
We design multiple versions of the application each time refining and improving it, until we get our desired result. we iterate often to fail often, to learn from our mistakes making fewer of them with each iteration of the design.

by following the assess design build iterative cycle we

• Assess: what the user is currently doing
• Design: we use what we've learned in the assessment phase to design a solution that solves our problems
• Build: we take our designs and build them so that we can further assess what works. 

for our assessment we leverage UX Research

• Interviews: we talk to people one on one to collect information about our system
• Observations: we watch people interact with our system to get a feel for how people use our system
• Surveys: we conduct surveys for large groups of people to get feedback
• User Testing: we give users tasks to complete and assess how easily they complete their tasks
• Inspection: we use best practices and common sense to assess if a system works well

for our design phase we use UX Design 

• Personas, Scenarios, User stories
• Sketching, Ideation 
• Story-boarding:
• Mapping & Navigation design
• Comparative research: compare to existing products to see how they solve problems
• Lo/Mid/Hi-fidelity prototypes: 

Components of UX

• Value: is the system useful to our target audience, is it better then alternatives.
• Usability: Can user do what they need to do.
• Desirability: Is it fun to use, attractive, pleasant to use. Do users want to use your system
• Adaptability: how easy is it to find and start using our system

Assessing UX Questions

	Understanding users	Evaluating designs
Value	What do user need?	Does this design fulfil the need?
Usability	How do users do it now?	Can they accomplish it currently?
Desirability	What do user want?	Does the design appeal to the users?
Adoptability	Where do users look for things?	Can users find & access the system