webinar "Intro To User Experience Design:

Rethinking the Design Process".

Today, I am happy to introduce to you one of

the Cardinal Path UX team members,

also known as a major force in the

Cardinal Path design team, Mike Jones.

Mike is based out of our Phoenix

office where he works closely with

both internal teams and with clients to ensure striking and,

more importantly, effective design.

For those of you who have not attended a

Cardinal Path webinar yet,

though looking through the attendee list

it looks like most of you have,

my name is Kent

and I will be sitting in on this presentation and taking

any questions asked in the GoToMeeting's

question pane in the

overall GoToMeeting panel.

Then, at the end of this webinar,

I will feed these back to Mike

and we will see if we can answer as

many of them as we can.

So, without further ado... Mike

take this away.

MIKE: Hi everybody, this is Mike Jones.

We'll be doing an intro to user experience design

webinar this morning

hopefully you guys find it

helpful

and engaging.

uh

Real quick, just a couple of

things about me.

As Kent already mentioned, I'm a UX

and user interface designer here at Cardinal Path.

Those are some of my contact handles

if you want to reach out to me after the webinar,

that would be awesome and I can answer any

further questions you guys might have.

There will be another slide at

the end so you guys can get that info.

So, we'll jump right in.

Three main things we are going to cover today are:

What is user experience, or UX

and why should we care?

Secondly is

websites and UX.

So, how does user experience

deal with websites and website design.

And finally, breaking down UX into five planes.

We will get into that in a little bit.

We'll start with "What is User Experience?"

Or UX.

As you'll see in the industry,

UX is generally the term or the

acronym you'll see most for "User Experience".

So, what is user experience?

Seems like everyone is throwing this

word around right now, I see it

all over

blogs, and not just design blogs,

but also

blogs centered around

business and start ups

centered around

big companies like Apple.

Apple's been a huge

force in bringing

user experience to the

forefront of business.

But what is it?

What the heck is this term

people are throwing around?

I thought

a good place to start is the

all-knowing Wikipedia.

Because they're the source

of everything useful.

</sarcasm>

But actually, in this case,

it's pretty relevant.

I thought their explanation, they're

synopsis of User Experience was really helpful.

Basically, they said,

"User Experience, or UX,

is the way a person

feels about using a product,

system or service."

I think that sums it up

pretty well.

So,

basically,

what we want to say

user experience is

is "UX equals Feelings".

How people feel about

using whatever it is you are putting in front of them.

Let's break this down a little bit.

before we jump into

the design of UX.

I want to make sure we understand

user experience and what goes into that.

First up is

let's break down a user.

Ultimately, a user is a person.

So, it's a real human being.

They have

dreams

They have goals.

They have thoughts and desires.

And ultimately, when they

use something they're

generally doing it with

something in mind that

they want to accomplish at the end of it.

Whether that's a product,

or a website

or some service that you provide,

that has a user at some level.

And these users

are people, so they're

emotional, they have feelings.

And ultimately, it's these

feelings about your product that

become the user experience.

Everyday we make decisions,

based on how we feel.

So, the decisions that people make

about your product

or the final conclusion

they make about your website

are generally based on what they feel

and not so much

based on

what we like to think of as

the very logical steps of

did they accomplish exactly what

they were looking to do.

That's a big part of it

but

ultimately, it's feelings and emotions that

build that user experience.

And finally,

it's about experience,

it's about using something.

Ultimately, it's about accomplishing a goal.

So, when we talk about users

who have feelings,

when they're using something like

your product or your service,

ultimately,

they're trying to accomplish something

at the end of that.

So, we'll talk more about that in a minute.

A great example is

making a phone call

and making a reservation at a restaurant.

So, the user in this case is

someone making a phone call.

And ultimately their goal or their desire is to

book a reservation.

But there's a lot of things that

go into that experience, such as:

the phone they're using,

or

how the person answers the call

on the other end,

and then that whole conversation,

that experience with that other person,

all comes together to build the user experience.

All in the blink of,

you know, 5 minutes at the most.

Another example might be

a day trader, someone who trades stock all day.

A lot of these people do that online