Personas and archetypes are different ways of communicating the same user research data. Archetypes describe categories of users; personas humanize those categories to illustrate real impact.
The endowment effect explains why users value things more once they feel ownership. In UX, we can design for this effect to increase engagement and user retention.
While UX is often conflated with limited concepts such as usability, interactions, and technology, a holistic user experience considers a person's thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Personas are personified representations of real information about our target audience that enable us to design with real customers in mind. They help us align ideas and apply what we know.
Data refers to unanalyzed user observations, findings capture patterns among data points, and insights are the actionable opportunities based on research and business goals.
A cognitive walkthrough is a task-based usability-inspection technique used to evaluate the learnability of a system from the perspective of a new user.
The empathy-mapping process helps distill and categorize knowledge of the user into one place, while the artifact serves as quick, digestible way to illustrate user attitudes and behaviors.
Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.
Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability is defined by 5 quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.
Considering 3 main antipersonas in your design process can prevent much misuse or other grief which would undermine the user experience after the product is released.
The only realistic design strategy is to cater to the actual people who use your product, instead of designing for an idealized super-user who knows more and is more motivated than the real audience.
Antipersonas represent people who could misuse your product in ways that negatively impact target users and the business. Formalizing a description of the 8 aspects of an antipersonas can help a design team mitigate such risks.
It's hard work to make a user interface that's easy to use. The end result may seem obvious to an outsider, but ease-of-use comes from trying out many design ideas and rejecting ones that are too difficult while polishing those that make the UI better.
Data about what users do is valuable, but not nearly as valuable as information about why people did something. Such "why" insight should drive UX design decisions.
