Up Next: Typography and More on User Research
Which sign in the image above are you most likely to obey and elicits a stop action in you. Most likely the first top left sign. One of the great things typography enables, friends.
Typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes it legible, clear, and visually appealing to the reader. In a nutshell, typography brings text to life. You can build emotions and the confidence of your users through typography.
The Importance of Typography
Typography is much more than just beautiful text. The following are the importance of typography:
· Typography helps to guide the user along the page.
· Typography helps the user to perform an action on your website/app
· Typography is emotional. If not correctly used, it can pass across the wrong message.
Terms used in Typography/Type details
· Kerning — adjusting the space between just two letters
Tracking — Adjusting the overall spacing of a group of letters i.e. ensuring that there is equal spacing
· Leading/Line spacing — The vertical space/distance from the baseline of one line type to another.
· Typeface — An artistic interpretation, or design, of a collection of alphanumeric symbols. A typeface may include letters, numerals, punctuation, various symbol, etc
· Font weight — As the name implies, the weight or heaviness of the strokes in a typeface. To lay emphasis on a particular section or word you can increase the font weight. For example, for headers use bold and use light weight for the body of the text. This creates a good contrast.
· Font Size — The font size will impact and guide what action the user will take on the application/product.
· Alignment: There are three types of alignment: Left, right and center. In the western culture left aligned text is the best practice as people read from left to right. Right alignment is good for Arabic and Hebrew cultures as they read from the right to the left. Center alignment is good for titles and buttons. Justified alignment creates equal alignment on both sides.
Our guest lecturer, one of the best product designers @Chukwuka Ezeoke explained user research methods to create a great product/service.
More on User Research
User research helps you make the best decisions to create the best products that are of value to your user.
Qualitative vs Quantitative
· Qualitative — How your users feel will fall under qualitative research. For example, why did the user click on this?
· Quantitative — This research method has to do with the numbers. How many people clicked on this feature?
Discovery vs Validation
· Discovery — Research done at the beginning of the product life cycle. For example, who are the potential customers/users; Do they have a problem we should be fixing?
· Validation — You have come up with a brilliant idea or solution and you need to test it out. You are still trying to determine if your solution is best for your proposed users or is of the best value to them.
· Insight vs evidence vs ideas
Research is carried out for three main reasons for: insight, evidence, ideas
· Insight: Find your users need or provide a direction to your team
· Evidence: When you need to impress other stakeholders asides from your team.
· Ideas: When you want to generate more ideas for your product.
· Investment: The resources you need to carry out a project or research method. These include: time, money, people, etc and it should be justifiable to yourself before presenting it to management.
· In the moment research: Based off real time interaction with your product or service. Getting live data with the ongoing interaction with your product.
Research Methods
· In-depth interviews: It falls achieves qualitative, discovery, insight. Medium investment is required
· User/Usability testing: Quantitative — It enables you to test how long it takes your user to sign-up. Qualitative — Why did it take your user so long to sign-up?
· Guerrila Interview: It is carried out for public interviews. For example, asking random people in the mall to test your product.
· Contextual Research: It is qualitative. Requires high investment and takes a longer time
· Web analytics: It is quantitative. How many people visited your site, how long did it take them to click checkout. Low investment required. Useful in discovery & insight research.
· Card sorting: How do you arrange things in your product/service? Is it in a way that makes sense to the user? Card sorting enables you to achieve that. Write out specific words and ask your users how they would group them. For example: Lipgloss, eyeshadow would probably fall under makeup under the beauty section on a website/product. Ask your potential users what they would like to see on the platform.
Card sorting is both quantitative and qualitative — The quantitative aspect, for example, how many people put foundation under makeup
· Tree Testing: You present your user with a task. For example, I want you to locate makeup on a website. You need to know how many people can find a particular item. It is quantitative.
· Survey: Used in quantitative and discovery research and assists you post launch. It is also in the moment. For example, please take a minute to rate us.
· A/B Testing: This research method is carried out when you have different variations of a design or feature and you need people to test it out.
· Eye tracking: For example, why are people more fixated on a particular thing more than others. It could be that they like a particular item or they are distracted. Another example, if you have a particular button and people are not clicking on it, you need to find out why. Eye tracking is a method to achieve that.
· Heuristic Analysis: Evaluating interfaces to find out if things were missed out when designing. A small set of evaluators will examine the interface in comparison with recognised design principles.
· Competitors Analysis: Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strength and weaknesses relative to yours.
