This is part two in a series on learning how to become an experience designer. In part one, I noted that a great designer blends both design and business skills. I provided a list of key business topics and recommended some of the better books available to learn those skills. In this part, I will cover the essential design skills needed for a great experience designer.
So what does it take to become an experience designer? I believe that a designer should be able to:
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- Identify the customer and their needs
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- Identify the touch points and devices needed to support the activity
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- Ability to define and design the touches
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- Be an expert on at least one type of interaction
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- Ability to communicate your design to others
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- Identify what makes the experience unique and better
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- Identify ways to improve it
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- Ability to work collaboratively
- Understand business
Understanding Design
Design is a skill that is learned with practice. Reading and classroom knowledge is helpful. But, you need to start creating designs and getting feedback on where they work and where they could be better. Working as part of a development team, over time, you can start to anticipate what will work well for the people who will use the product. It is also helpful to learn what can be developed given technical constraints of the devices that will provide the touchpoints and the tools used to create them.
Here are some recommendations for learning some of the key design skills.
Identify the Customer and Their Needs. There are many ways to create requirements. For a good experience, many of the requirements should be generated by observing and interacting with the people who will likely buy or use what you are creating. Some of the best books on this topic are:
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- User and Task Analysis by Hackos and Redish
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- Contextual Design by Beyer and Holtzblatt
- The Persona Lifecycle by Pruitt and Adlin
Identify the Touchpoints and Devices Needed to Support the Activity. An experience can be large or small. It can span over multiple devices. It is important to understand the end to end experience and create an environment that supports people through their activity. Sketches are helpful at this stage of the design. Here are two great resources for learning more:
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- Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
- Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
Ability to Define and Design the Touchpoints – be an Expert on at Least One Type of Interaction. There are many types of devices and interactions that make up a complete experience. Depending on the complexity, it may not be possible for one designer to design it all. But, as a designer, you must become an expert on at least one type of design. This can range from Windows or Macintosh applications, web sites, web applications, mobile devices such as Android or iPhone, voice response systems, documentation, training, point of purchase, and others. Rather than provide a complete list of resources, I will just recommend picking one or two of these and seeking out the experts in that area to learn from. Attend the relevant conferences. Learn to prototype for that type of interaction.
Define and Design the Touches. Using what you know about the device or touchpoint, create prototypes that can be tested. Prototypes can be done on paper or online and range in fidelity from sketches to very realistic. You may want to start out using very rough sketch style prototypes to work out the major ideas. As the project progresses, you can more to more detailed prototypes. The type of feedback you will get will be much different – if you start with high fidelity prototypes, people may only focus on the colors rather than the flow of the activity. A couple of good resources on prototyping are:
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- Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder
- Effective Prototyping by Jonathan Arnowitz
Ability to Communicate Your Design to Others. This is a key design skill. You will be frequently communicating designs to many people on the project team. Sometimes that means drawing at a white board. Sometimes it means creating design specifications. Today, it often means working with others via online meeting tools. One of the best skills for a designer is being able to tell the story of what the intended experience will be like. Here are a few suggestions to get started:
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- Storytelling for User Experience by Quesenbury and Brooks
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- Communicating Design by Dan Brown
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- Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte
- Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
Identify What Makes This Experience Unique and Better. To be competitive, you need to create things that are better that what people can find elsewhere. A circus is just a circus, right? By identifying and finding key differentiators, you can design something different from the competition. One sign of a maturing industry is that the bulleted feature list becomes less important in differentiating products. Instead people seek out the product that has identified the key things that are important to them. One great resource to learn more is:
- Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne
Identify Opportunities to Improve the Experience. A key part of experience design is continuous improvement. Products are usability tested. Information is gathered from current customers. At every opportunity, the interactions are improved. A few good resources to learn about improving products are:
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- Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeffrey Rubin
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- Remote Research by Nate Bolt
- Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik
Work Collaboratively. Great designs are usually the work of a great team. Sometimes a lone person can design and build something great. One of the best examples of teamwork is improvisational comedy. I have written about experience design and improvisation and so have others like Traci Lepore. One of the better books on improvisation is:
- Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation by Charna Halpern
More to Come. The thing about experience design is that some basic concepts stay the same. There are some principals of designing for humans that work regardless of the device. Some design and research techniques have worked well for many years. However, as we learn and grow as a field, there are always new areas to develop. A few areas that aren’t new but that are definitely worth an updated look include design for social and community interactions, design for search, and including content as part of the design strategy.
Hopefully this list is a helpful overview of the skills needed by an experience designer.
Did I miss a skill? Is there a resource you would recommend? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.
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