User Experience Redesign

Task Analysis

In this project, students focus on the user experience along with the visual design of a website. They identify several sites that include some sequence of pages that enable their users to accomplish some task. Once they identify a site, they perform a task analysis of the page sequence. Students observe and interview several friends to identify user goals, motivation and the work-flow they use to accomplish the task.

Synthesizing Insights with Storyboarding

After they complete their task analysis, the students synthesize insights through several sets of storyboards both documenting the current state of the task, and proposing new work-flows in future-use scenario storyboards.

Low Fidelity Prototyping and User Testing

Using their storyboards to understand the context of use, the students quickly design lo-fi prototypes for user testing. The students observe the use of these prototypes before moving to the next iteration of paper prototypes.

The HTML Build

In this example, SDSU student Michael Mazourek has redesigned the task of ordering a late night cheeseburger from RubyTuesday by performing a task analysis, prototyping divergent ideas, and then finally building static HTML/CSS pages of his revised task. One of the insights Michael synthesized during his investigation was that when you're in a certain state of mind in the late evening, you don't want as many choices but his users did want the juicy looking burger pictures to get them ready to eat!

Once the visual design and work-flow are designed, the students finish the project they practice their HTML & CSS skills by building functional prototypes of the sequence of pages needed to accomplish the task they’ve identified.