UX Goals

Hello again! Today we are going to talk about user experience goals for our product which we introduced a few blog posts ago. First thing to remember when searching for UX goals is that the whole point of our product is to boost knowledge sharing and information flow within and between projects. So not only does our product need to have helpful information but also it needs to be easily accessible and in a right form. 

After reminding ourselves about the facts above we have found three user experience goals to aim for when developing our product and the interactive prototype. We have based these goals on Nielsen’s (2020) usability heuristics and Normans (2013) seven fundamental principles of design. 

First user experience goal we determined is consistency. By which we intend making the product clear with consistently named and marked links, consistent mapping and implementation in accordance with standards. As Jacob’s Law says, users spend most of their time on other sites (2017). So, to make our product easily usable we need to make it work with the same standards as other sites. This goals success is relatively easy to measure because there are basic standards which we can implement on our product. But the consistency on naming and marking buttons for example is not as easy to measure. 

The second goal is minimalism. As you may guess this means that we want to make the product as minimalist as possible without it making things to be hard to find. Because the point with this product is to boost knowledge sharing, it is useful to make it simple and quick to use. Adding too many features and buttons may cause it to be messy and making it hard to find what the user is looking for. The way of measuring this goal may be done when checking the interactive prototype usability on the users. While they test the prototype, we can analyze how quickly the user can find what they are looking for and also, we can get feedback after the test. 

The third and last goal is help. By this we wish to establish easy access to help and hints on our product. We hope to be able to make the product even more clear to the user by search hints and help provided when needed. For example, the product could give the user suggestions when they are typing the search word. Also using signifiers on the product will make help more accessible. Measuring help is not as easy job as the measuring of the previous goals is. Feedback might be the most effective way to measure the success of this goal and getting the feedback is slower, so this is something we need to focus on when developing the features regarding this goal. 

That is all of our user experience goals we have set for our product and ways to measure them. We have been working hard on defining the specifics on our product these past weeks and now we are looking forward starting to plan and put together our interactive prototype. We have been continuing with sharing responsibilities equally to all of us and because it has been working well for us we are going to continue doing it. 

See you soon with our next post!

Best wishes,

KBD💎

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We got a tip from the course personnel that we could describe the different UX goals from the perspective of the user so here are short sentences made of the UX goals from the users perspective.

Consistency creates the feeling that the platform is familiar feeling and effortless to use.

With minimalism the user feels that the use is easy and comfortable, and it doesn't create any extra stress.

The proximity to help feels comforting to user creating the feeling of importance.

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References:

Nielsen, J. (2020). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Nielsen Norman Group. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ (Referred 27.3.2021)

Norman, D. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. (pp. 72-73). Basic Books: New York. 

Nielsen, J. (2017). Jacob’s Law of Internet User Experience. Nielsen Norman Group. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/videos/jakobs-law-internet-ux/ (Referred 27.3.2021)