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===Iterative Design Process=== | ===Iterative Design Process=== | ||
[[File:IterativeDesign.png|300px|iterative design process]] | [[File:IterativeDesign.png|300px|iterative design process]] | ||
The iterative design process helps you to structure your design process. It is an easy to use cycle model. | |||
Doing the steps helps you to understand your users by doing research. So you don't design for non-existing needs or interfaces nobody can use. It helps as well to be more creative at the end: by dealing with your users, you will see your designs from a new perspective and so develop new ideas. | The iterative design process helps you to structure your design process. It is an easy to use cycle model, which steps you can follow. The Process of doing so is explained in this guide. | ||
The steps are: | |||
* '''Research:''' in which you gather informations about user goals, existing problems and already existing solutions. | |||
*'''Formulating you goals:''' Helps you to know what you actually want to archive with your design (and what not!). This can be seen as belonging to research but it is crucial to make the research useful, so it's got its own bullet-point! | |||
*'''Design:''' Is creating solutions for what you want to archive. You start with a broad design of that is fairly abstract and make your ideas more concrete over time. | |||
*'''Testing:''' After you designed you need to test if your ideas work as you expected. This is can be a hard thing to do because some things that seem to be great turn out to be unsuitable for your users. Otherwise you will get all sorts of interesting insights that will help you in improving your ideas. | |||
The model is called iterative because you will go through the all steps several time. Doing all steps one after the other one time is known as an "interation". Each time you do so, you improve your product and former abstract things will become more concrete. | |||
So what is it good for? Following the steps helps you to understand your users by doing research. So you don't design for non-existing needs or interfaces nobody can use. It helps as well to be more creative at the end: by dealing with your users, you will see your designs from a new perspective and so develop new ideas. | |||
===Usability Goals=== | ===Usability Goals=== | ||
The usability goals are a | The usability goals are a collection of the very basic user needs. They are broad, but you will have no trouble to understand them. | ||
====Utility==== | ====Utility==== | ||
If your product's functionality matches the needs of your users and enables them to reach their goals it has a good utility. | If your product's functionality matches the needs of your users and enables them to reach their goals it has a good utility. | ||
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====Learnability==== | ====Learnability==== | ||
A good learnability exists if the users you target can use your product without putting a lot of effort | A good learnability exists if the users you target can use your product without putting a lot of effort learning. This is especially important for the very basic functions. | ||
Ideally users don't have to bother about new concepts and unknown terms. | Ideally users don't have to bother about new concepts and unknown terms. | ||
Learnability is what will be the first thing that comes into your mind if you think about interaction design. Paradoxically it is a principle that is ignored in many products: Industry often uses a lot of functions that | Learnability is what will be the first thing that comes into your mind if you think about interaction design. Paradoxically it is a principle that is ignored in many products: Industry often uses a lot of functions that diminish learnability and many student projects ignore learnablity and focus on efficiency. | ||
You can improve the learnability of your application by learning common principles of design like "visibility" or " | You can improve the learnability of your application by learning common principles of design like "visibility" or "consistency" and by testing your ideas with your users. Material for learning this will be provided in latter chapters. | ||
====Efficiency==== | ====Efficiency==== | ||
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===Simplicity=== | ===Simplicity=== | ||
==Get to know what your users need== | ==Get to know what your users need== | ||
===What we want to archive=== | ===What we want to archive=== | ||