User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

 


B00138525 Jack Roche

Content Management Systems 

CA 1- Publishing Task 1

User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

Here is everything you need to know about UI/UX design this week, with the end of the Adobe Max virtual conference I will discuss User Experience and the best practice for website creation, links to the videos I found useful in my research down below.

 


Adobe Session 1

 

Grace Ling provides a striking insight into what her life was like growing up and studying neuroscience before coming to work at Electronic Arts where she works as a UX designer.  Neuroscience has little/nothing to do with UX, but she found herself in that career all the same with no educational background other than her self-taught skills and interests on the subject- Showing just how UX can be experienced and learned in the workplace, and you never stop learning more and more about it as she continues to express how much she is still learning even in the last couple of months.

While she speaks on UX design on a more game design related note her words and wisdom travel far across all mediums of UX. She feels that a crux to the way one designs UX is to resonate with this particular UX’s users, I feel this is to mean what are their needs, what are their wants, and is there anyway to simplify or design a piece of UX around this particular user. Credit to Graces event producer and event manager side, she is able to design UX for certain events and collaborations for example the UX behind a website for people wanting to connect with Electronic Arts during E3 (An annual gaming event), this can give her vast amounts of knowledge on the user. What has been done in the past, what worked and didn’t work, what were users interested in the website for, was the website simple and easy to traverse, is there any way the website can flow even better.

Self- reflection:

Grace gave me the reassurance that UX design is something that’s learned through practice, if she can work in EA of all places and be completely self-taught, then with the UX design work I have under my belt and the learning process’s I encounter everyday I hope to work to an equivalent or higher standard sooner rather than later.





 

Adobe Session 2

 

With speakers Zoya Bylinskii, Aleena Niklaus Rob Haverty, Stephanie Day and Tianyuan Cai, this session explores some of the more unique challenges UX designers come into contact with outside of making an easy-to-use website for users. This talk focus on users with certain reading, learning or exploring disabilities or challenges, this includes the blind, dyslexic readers, colour-blind audiences and the importance of personalized reading settings.

To start, have you ever wondered what being colour blind is like? if you think all colours disappear and the world looks like an old black and white talkie, you would be wrong just like I was before this session. The world of colour blindness has a strange phenomenon where certain colour tones will look the exact same as wildly different colour tones, so one person could say the apple is green, and another could say it is blue. With the use of adobe colour picker, this can be prevented in website design, so that your enticing “Buy Now” button doesn’t blend into the background of a page to a colour-blind user.


Colour blindness filter: On

Colour blindness filter: Off


As well as this, Adobe has also rolled out an auto tag API for PDF scanners. What this means is now instead of PDF readers meeting a PDF with no tags and not being able to read any information to a blind user, we can now auto fill in the tags required. The session goes on to state that 90% of PDF’s online are non-PDF reader compatible due to no tags, this is detrimental to the massive blind userbase online every day and can easily be avoided. Tags are implemented in website development, it is a UX designers’ job to use them.


A screenshot from the session


As well as all this, the use of rulers while reading texts online can increase a dyslexic user reading efficiency significantly. This can be done using a grey box which follows the user’s cursor over lines of text, a black box version and an underline ruler version. With this feature it becomes easier for dyslexic users to follow text on a screen where they would otherwise spend larger amounts of time processing this text, the more convenient and easier it is to read text on a website is detrimental to its success as all it takes is one click for a user to leave and never return.


The types of real world reading rulers used as a base for the virtual reading rulers


Digital reading rulers

Self- reflection:

The use of tags and general design techniques are some of the basics I learned about website UX design in first and second year, but I feel these features I have extracted from this section are a class of UX design features I should strive to use in every website/content management system I produce in the future.


References



Adobe Max


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