Day 93 - Storytelling Building Blocks

Yes, this is a blog about ux but story telling is a key part of human experience often using words and actions to tell a story. Stories are fundamental to meaning, memory, and experience.
These are the building blocks to complex narratives:

1. Rags to riches (a story that follows a rise to happiness).
2. Tragedy.
3. Riches to rags (one that follows a fall in happiness).
4. Man in a hole (fall-rise).
5. Icarus (rise-fall).
6. Cinderella (rise-fall-rise).
7. Oedipus (fall-rise-fall).

Day 92 - User Experience Problem Solving

If you want to understand a product's vision, you need to understand what problem the product is solving for, who is the product's user, what is their context, and how you plan to improve the user's experience.

1. Frame the problem by understanding your user's needs, user's anxieties, and business goals.
2. Dig deep and explore many solutions before narrowing the focus of the solution.
3. Prioritize and create a specific plan of action with timelines that address the most important needs.

Day 91 - What Speed Should Your UI Animations Be

Good  timing and duration for animated UIs are around 200ms to 500ms seconds.  This is more of an art than a science. Always test and adjust how fast your animation is.  Smaller animations will be in the 100ms or 200ms range, while larger animations that have more area to cover will be in the higher ranges.

Day 90 - Cognitive Load

What's cognitive load?  It's the amount of mental processing power needed to use your product, app, or service.

• Minimize cognitive load by keeping it simple.
• Minimize cognitive load by removing non-essential content and elements
• Minimize cognitive load by breaking the experience into smaller, easily-understandable segments controlled by the pace of the user.

Day 89 - Participant Observation

1. What do people do now?
2. What values and goals do people have?
3. How are these particular activities embedded in a larger ecology?
4. What are the similarities and differences across people?
5. Pay attention to all the artifacts.
6. Look for work arounds and hacks.
7. Errors are a goldmine.
8. If you ask people what they want (lead in questions) as opposed to observing what they do, you can be easily led astray.
9. Find out what people's goals are.
1. Try and do.
2. Ask and listen.
3. Watch and observe.

Day 88 - Advice for Conducting User Research Interviews

• Set schedule yourself
• Factor in breaks
• Recruit more participants than you need
• Record the sessions
• Be casual and conversational
• Ask open-ended questions
• Ask about behaviors not feelings
• Don’t judge their answers
• Paraphrase what you heard
• Be grateful

Day 87 - Designing with Empathy

Millions of people world wide have a disability so remember to design with empathy.

1. Pay attention to color for people with color blindness
2. Learn how screen readers work
3. Label everything usefully
4. Put yourself in the customer's shoes
5. Talk to people with disabilities