Customer/User Experience @ the Digital Academy
- Tess Good
On this page:
What is User Experience (UX), anyway?
how does it intersect with Service Design?
10 Principles of Good Design · Ministry of Environment & Climate Change Strategy (ENV)
for inspiration and x-gov practice sharing
Learning Design & Curation signature/heuristics
coming soon
What is User Experience, anyway?
If Service Design supports the operations necessary to deliver a good customer experience, how can we break down what makes a good experience?
Enter: the UX Honeycomb, developed by Peter Morville.
(this is NOT an order of operations for doing the work)
Disclaimers!
in practice the work isn’t quite as neat-and-tidy as the tables below might suggest, e.g. practices that make an experience usable also make it credible. The distinctions below are a bit rigid for clarity, in practice the work is much more fluid and intersectional.
this table is full of resources that trend beginner or intro-level (this is the tip of the iceberg of each topic). Why so many links? This work is broad and deep, and you need to consider different things, and take different approaches, depending on the context. “It depends”.
this is a broad skillset and workload for a single designer to own. We have 4 job profiles at BCPS that can help us chunk and share the workload, leveraging everyone’s strengths and unique experiences (UX Research, UX Design, Content Design, and Service Design). Be kind to your generalists and design-teams-of-one
THINK · What do users think about the product? Is it useful? Is it valuable? Do they find it credible? | |
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USEFUL“As practitioners, we can’t be content to paint within the lines... We must have the courage and creativity to ask whether our products and systems are useful, and to apply our knowledge of craft + medium to define innovative solutions that are more useful.” Peter Morville VALUABLE“Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.” Peter Morville
| For an experience to be useful and valuable, we need to understand why we’re offering the experience (business) and why someone is interacting with it (user). The experience needs to solve real, whole problems and have measurable impact. Design research topic on digital.gov.bc.ca Agility topic on digital.gov.bc.ca What the work entails:
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FEEL · How do people feel about the product? Do they find it desirable? Also, do they feel it’s credible? | |
|---|---|
DESIRABLE | CREDIBLE |
“Our quest for efficiency must be tempered by an appreciation for the power and value of image, identity, brand, and other elements of emotional design.” PM | “Thanks to the Web Credibility Project, we’re beginning to understand the design elements that influence whether users trust and believe what we tell them.” PM |
Often framed in terms of ‘visual aesthetics’ (identity, branding), but can be so much more: Emotion and cognition go hand in hand. For someone to want, enjoy using, return to a product/service, and hopefully recommend it to others: we can layer in an understanding of how to design for emotion, and how emotion impacts the brain. The visual and emotional ‘tone’ of our experience needs to match the context. What the work entails:
‘Desirable’ experiences involve almost everything on this page, the traditional focus on aesthetics maps to the “usable” quadrant below, e.g. visual design and heuristics. | Broadly, trust in government is a hot topic these days. For the Academy, we’ll be building trust with IM/IT folks looking for us to provide credible support for the very difficult work they’re often asked to do. Privacy topic on digital.gov.bc.ca
What the work entails:
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DO or USE · When it comes to actually using the product, is it findable, accessible and usable? | ||
|---|---|---|
FINDABLE | ACCESSIBLE | USABLE |
“We must strive to design navigable web sites and locatable objects, so users can find what they need.” PM | “Just as our buildings have elevators and ramps, our web sites should be accessible to people with disabilities (more than 10% of the population). Today, it’s good business and the ethical thing to do. Eventually, it will become the law.” PM | “Ease of use remains vital, and yet the interface-centered methods and perspectives of human-computer interaction do not address all dimensions of web design. In short, usability is necessary but not sufficient.” PM |
Can a user find our service/product AND easily navigate within it? Ultimately, when people interact with an experience they’re looking for content (words, images, videos, etc.) that meets their need. I like to say that content is the experience. Information architecture connects people to the content they’re looking for. It includes searching, filtering, browsing and wayfinding, labels, tags, metadata, and more. Content topic on digital.gov.bc.ca
What the work entails:
| Inclusive design describes methodologies to create products that understand and enable people of all backgrounds and abilities. It may address accessibility, age, economic situation, geographic location, language, race, and more. (NN/g) Accessibility topic on digital.gov.bc.ca What the work entails:
| Ease of use of the experience: clear, intuitive, can effectively and efficiently complete a goal (NOT the same thing as useful). Note: generally we want to avoid friction in our experiences, but sometimes we introduce it intentionally. For example, if you were designing a banking feature, you might want to introduce an extra ‘review’ step before moving money around to double-check the transaction and avoid stressful mistakes. If designing a simple form, it could really annoy people and be unnecessary to have a ‘review before submitting’ function. “It depends” and context is everything. Visual design topic on digital.gov.bc.ca
What the work entails:
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10 Principles of Good Design · ENV