ETS User Experience

What is User Experience?

While it is tempting to see User Experience Design only in terms of the end-result of our work (i.e. the screens that people see and interact with every day) as with all design, the final result is the tip of the iceberg. Before you can design or even define a product, you need to understand the goals, needs, desires and perspectives of those who will use the product. And the more you know about users and their tasks, the easier it will be to make those decisions.

Through careful research (ideally through observation and direct interaction) coupled with analysis and modeling, user experience designers create a holistic view of the product from the user's perspective. This, in collaboration with stakeholders and the development team, results in prioritized requirements, specifications, use cases, and interaction and visual designs.

User Experience Design encompasses such fields as:

Information Architecture: defining structure, organization and labeling of information and data; navigation

Information Design:  gathering, filtering, and presenting information in order to understand --- and communicate to others --- the essence, the meaning of that information

Interaction Design: defining behavior of products and systems with which users interact, informed by understanding users through user research

Usability Engineering: testing software with users as well as via evaluation using usability and accessibility heuristics

Visual Design: graphic treatment of all visible elements to be communicative and attractive

User Interface Development: coding interactive prototypes and/or the final interface

What do we do?

Coming up with a clear and accurate picture of the user and their requirements is not a singular process--there are many activities and tools that can be applied. In ETS-User Experience we primarily, but not exclusively, draw on a set of techniques commonly known as User Centered Design (UCD), enabling us to put users in the center of our design process. Our group is particularly drawn to the Goal-Directed Design method as defined and popularized by Alan Cooper, et al in the book, About Face, The Essentials of Interaction Design.

This starts with research to understand the business and the user, and modeling to come up with user requirements. From user requirements flow personas, use cases, scenarios, flow diagrams and functional specifications. Then follow early designs of interactions, typically in the form of wireframes which can be reviewed and tested and incorporated into functional prototypes and code. The degree to which each of these activities is done and whether they are done strictly in this order varies from project to project.  For more details on these and other UX related activities, see the Fluid Design Handbook, which the ETS-UX team was instrumental in creating.

What projects is the ETS User Experience Group involved with?

• Sakai Foundation
  • Sakai 2.x
  • Sakai 3.0 User and Group Management
  • Sakai Product Council
• Opencast Community
  • Matterhorn
• The Fluid Project (formal involvement on the Fluid Project from March 2007 to June 2009)
• bSpace
• webcast.berkeley.edu

Other ETS UX activities

• Campus UCD group
• UX Campus Advisory Group
• Campus Web Accessibility Group