Chapter 1: A Design Process For Digital Products

 I learned that if we design and develop digital products in such a way that the people who use them can easily achieve their goals, they will be satisfied, effective, and happy. The word Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. This word can be understood by understanding the desires, needs, motivations, and contexts of people using products, understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements, and constraints ,using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products whose form, content, and behavior are useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible and is useful for many design disciplines.

Throughout design software and interactive digital products have greatly improved and companies have begun to focus on serving people’s needs with their products and are spending the time and money needed to support the design process. Many digital products and software frequently interrogate users, bombarding them with a string of terse questions that they are neither inclined nor prepared to answer: “Where did you hide that file?” Patronizing questions like “Are you sure?” and “Did you really want to delete that file, or did you have some other reason for pressing the Delete key?” are equally irritating and demeaning.

 There are many reasons why companies fail, which can include, Instead of planning and executing with a focus on satisfying the needs of the people who use their products, companies end up creating solutions that are difficult to use and control, no matter how technical they are.

Also, Digital products come into the world subject to the push and pull of two often-oppos- ing camps—marketers and developers and the digital technology industry doesn’t have a good under- standing of what it takes to make users happy. Funny enough most technology products get built without much understanding of users.

In the worst case, decisions about what a digital product will do and how it will communicate with users are simply a by-product of its construction. Developers, deep in their thoughts of algorithms and code, end up “designing” product behaviors in the same way that miners end up “designing” a landscape filled with cavernous pits. the digital product interaction design process alternates between the accidental and the nonexistent.

Furthermore, customers can’t articulate their problems, but can see it. “As time progressed, manufacturers of consumer products realized that they needed to differentiate their products from functionally identical products made by competitors, so design was introduced to increase user desire for a product. “Graphic designers like me were employed to create more effective packaging and advertising, and industrial designers were engaged to create more comfortable, useful, and exciting forms.

There is interface fail to meet user goals with alarming frequency. Some include They routinely: Make users feel stupid, Cause users to make big mistakes, require too much effort to operate effectively and don’t provide engaging experience. What are goals?goals are driven by the motivation of the human and can change overtime.  As I learned design based solely on understanding activities with the design in a model. Interestingly we as humans tend to form mental models that are simpler than reality. Therefore, if we create represented models that are simpler than the implementation model, we help the user achieve better understanding.

The process of combining techniques with models and principles can be divided into six phases: Research, Modeling, Requirements Definition, Framework Definition, Refinement, and Support

Research:

This phase employs ethnographic field study techniques (observation and contextual interviews) to provide qualitative data about potential l users of the product.

Modeling:

During modeling, behavior and workflow patterns discovered by analyzing the field research and interviews are synthesized into domain and user models.

Requirements Definition:

Design methods employed by teams during the Requirements Definition phase provide the much-needed connection between user and other models and design’s framework.

 Framework Definition:

In the Framework Definition phase, the basic framework for the product is created and based on basic frameworks for the product’s behavior, visual design, and, if applicable, physical form

Development support:

Developers’ questions as they arise during the construction process are answered.