From Chaos to Concept

This book is written for product design, software development, graphic design, and UX professionals with a focus on creating measurably better user experiences.

If you want to design solutions to meet business goals and delight your users, you can look to this resource which covers the following areas:

• Creating and documenting goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics
• Defining or refining personas based on your measurable objectives (OKRs)
• Creating and iterating on scenarios based your prioritized personas
• A team approach to defining the product and roadmap to address critical use cases
• Team based divergent ideation and solution exploration
• Team based convergent solution definition
• Wireframing potential solutions for rapid research and iteration
• Using quantitative and qualitative methods to understand usage and test with users
• Exploring approaches to taxonomy and information architecture
• Using psychology and human factors to drive your design decisions
• Developing performant, accessible, maintainable experiences
• Using analytics to measure the results and inform the next iteration
• How this process differs based on the size of the company or team that is employing it

Introduction: The Golden Butter Knife xv

CH 1: Make It Useful 1

What are We Trying to Do and How Will We Know If We Did It? 1

CH 2: Make It Usable 31

Who are We Designing This For?—Personas/User Segments 31

What Do They Need?—Scenarios 38

When Will We Design and Build It?: The Product Roadmap 42

CH 3: Make It Beautiful 59

Scannability, Readability, Comprehension 62

Using the Inverted Pyramid Model for Content 63

Alignment and the Grid 65

Visual Hierarchy 67

Composition 69

Scope 74

The Golden Triangle 74

The F, Z, and Other Gaze Patterns 76

Gestalt Patterns 77

Color 86

Thematic Appropriateness 88

Data Visualization 90

Further Reading 94

CH 4: Make It Functional 95

Framework-itis and Code Bloat 98

Testing across Platforms, Browsers, and Devices 99

Accessibility 102

Further Reading 105

CH 5: Make It Measurable 107

FaUX 107

Analytics 110

Conversions and Micro Conversions 111

Be Curious and Analytical 113

Google Analytics 115

Mouseflow 115

Reverse Path Analysis to Understand Failure 117

Being Misled by Your Data 118

Fear of Change 119

Ease the Fear of Change with A/B Testing 120

Some Helpful Tools of the Trade 121

Further Reading 122

CH 6: Make It Better 123

Planning Your Iterations 123

Research 124

Analysis 125

Findings 126

Recommendations 128

Prioritization 130

Effort 132

Further Reading 133

CH 7: Make These Methods Work for You 135

Starting with a Greenfield Project or at a Startup 135

Understanding the Market 136

What Comes Next? 154

Working within an Established Company 168

Conclusion 176

Index 179

KEVIN C. BRAUN is a UX design leader, speaker, educator, and author. He is the founder of Braun Interactive, a design consultancy located in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Kevin has over 24 years of software design and development experience. In that time he has worked to improve user experiences with world-class companies including Google, Samsung, Rolex, Hyundai, Michael Kors, MIT, Harvard, Cisco Systems, Keurig, and Vermont Teddy Bear. He has also worked with industry leaders in healthcare, insurance, automotive, mobile devices, and consumer goods.

The cost to fix an error found after product release was four to five times as much as one uncovered during design.
-THE IBM SYSTEMS SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals and badly defined system requirements are among the top documented reasons that software projects fail.
-THE IEEE SPECTRUM REPORT

Only one-quarter of the managers surveyed could list three of the company's five strategic priorities. Even worse, one-third of the leaders charged with implementing the company's strategy could not list even one.
-THE STRATEGIC AGILITY PROJECT MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW

FROM CHAOS TO CONCEPT

I wrote this book to help companies address the issues mentioned in the quotes to the left. If you are a designer, developer, product owner, or student looking to get into any of these professions this book will provide you with the methods and tools necessary to enable your teams to design and build experiences customers love and avoid the primary reasons software projects fail.

By reading this book you will learn how to use goals, strategies, and measurable objectives in combination with personas, scenarios, and use cases to create useful, usable, and beautiful user experiences. This book covers both UX strategy and execution and will help your company not only improve top-line revenue by creating products users love but also improve the bottom-line by creating operational efficiencies.

THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU...

• Stop designing and building useless products and features
  "There is nothing worse than a crisp image of a fuzzy concept"
  -ANSEL ADAMS
• Ensure your solutions are useable before you spend time and money making them beautiful
  "Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works."
  -STEVE JOBS
• Design your solutions so that they are beautiful and will enable users to scan, read, comprehend, and complete tasks more efficiently
  "Design is the silent ambassador to your brand"
  -PAUL RAND
• Measure the performance of your solutions and use data to drive the direction of your next iteration
  "There are so many people who can figure costs, and so few who can measure values."
  -JOHN JENNINGS