@Geeknrolla: Designing good user experience starts with picking your audience

Leisa Reichelt, freelance user experience consultant, talking about what startups most often get wrong about UX and what they should do about it.

Step 1: Find your audience.
It’s amazing how few startups actually know who their audience is. There is no such thing as ‘the general public.

Copyright @Basti

Copyright @Basti

Step 2: Know your audience
This is the step that a lot of companies just seem to ignore. Once you know who your audience is, invite some of them over for a beta testing focus group where you watch them use your app/product, and talk to them. Ask them questions about it – can you tell what it’s for? What can you do with it? How do you do it? You’ll end up with so much info you won’t know what to with it all. A product like AdobeConnect will allow for screensharing so you can be there as a virtual participant if you can’t meet your beta testers face to face.

Step 3 – Design for your audience
Consider using personas – make up an imaginary person based on the research you’ve done, include them in the design process when you’re deciding how the product’s going to work and what it’s going to do – instead of asking broad and useless questions, you can frame it in the context of your persona. Much more useful! Hire the best designer you can find as soon as you can – get them to design the styleguide that’s then used across the application/product.

Step 4. Think big and small
UX made up of a layer cake of processes; proposition, concept, structure, information, interaction.

Video:

UPDATE:
Leisa has now posted her slides and a detailed explanation behind her presentation: GeeknRolla – You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience