Branding in UX Design

So feelings clearly matter in a user interface. That's why we worry about user experience. But depending on the kind of product, the kind of service, the kind of system you're creating, then feelings matter in different ways. So I'm going to distinguish two major ways this can be. So first of all, where emotion is the primary goal of what you're designing.

So eliciting that emotion is the very purpose of the product. So think about art. Think about games, entertainment applications in general. What you're trying to do is create a *sense of emotion* in the person. That's the primary goal. Other things are secondary. Now, in order to satisfy that primary goal, you often need to get *good functionality* and *good usability*.

So when you’re wanting to choose what movie to watch, you want to be able to find, perhaps, the box set that you know is there and the right episode of it as efficiently as possible. So you still have these fundamental usability requirements, even if the primary goal is emotion. But it's often the things that serve that. So think about again, if you're going to share a picture you just taken a picture of, whether it's a meal you're eating

or your cats or whatever else you're wanting to share, the sharing is about the emotional impact that you're wanting to pass on to other people, to your friends, and to your family. However, when you take that photograph, you want a very efficient, slick and easy process to actually get that shared on your social media channels. So, again, although emotion is the primary purpose of what you're doing, you still need the usability and functionality in order to support that process.

Alternatively, emotion might be a secondary goal. So the primary purpose might be something that's more, shall we say, business like. It might be about your work. So like I'm doing now, producing this video, it might be about office work, might be using a spreadsheet, using a database, might be about getting your money from the ATM and get the money out of the hole in the wall.

It might be about paying using your card in a restaurant. But the thing you're trying to do at that point, the primary goal is to get the thing done efficiently and effectively. However, typically, emotions help. They help in the sense that if you're doing, say, a repetitive job, then being alert is important. You know, this is true whether you're a policeman on the beat and watching out, or a soldier in a battlefield situation.

Whether you're driving your car and needing to sort of have a little bit of peripheral awareness. So emotion helps you do that. It helps you keep alert so that you're ready for things. So if you think about online shopping. Some of online shopping is about getting the job done and getting the thing purchased. But there's also an aspect of shopping, this is particularly true of offline shopping. Of when you go into a clothes shop where

the actual process of doing the shopping is part of the joy of the shopping. It's harder to do that online, incidentally. But there are some brands where that is the thing you’re trying to do. You're trying to create a sense of identity in the brand, a sense of joy in exploring it. So within the same kind of application area, online shopping, depending on the brand and depending on the person's need at that moment,

you might want to emphasize one or the other.

User research is a crucial part of the design process. It helps to bridge the gap between what we think users need and what users actually need. User research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about the target audience or users of a product, service or system. Researchers use a variety of methods to understand users, including surveys, interviews, observational studies, usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting and tree testing, eye tracking

studies, A-B testing, ethnographic research and diary studies. By doing user research from the start, we get a much better product, a product that is useful and sells better. In the product development cycle, at each stage, you’ll different answers from user research. Let's go through the main points. What should we build? Before you even begin to design you need to validate your product idea. Will my users need this? Will they want to use it? If not this, what else should we build?

To answer these basic questions, you need to understand your users everyday lives, their motivations, habits, and environment. That way your design a product relevant to them. The best methods for this stage are qualitative interviews and observations. Your visit users at their homes at work, wherever you plan for them to use your product. Sometimes this stage reveals opportunities no one in the design team would ever have imagined. How should we build this further in the design process?

You will test the usability of your design. Is it easy to use and what can you do to improve it? Is it intuitive or do people struggle to achieve basic tasks? At this stage you'll get to observe people using your product, even if it is still a crude prototype. Start doing this early so your users don't get distracted by the esthetics. Focus on functionality and usability. Did we succeed? Finally, after the product is released, you can evaluate the impact of the design.

How much does it improve the efficiency of your users work? How well does the product sell? Do people like to use it? As you can see, user research is something that design teams must do all the time to create useful, usable and delightful products.

So feelings clearly matter in a user interface. That's why we worry about user experience. But depending on the kind of product, the kind of service, the kind of system you're creating, then feelings matter in different ways. So I'm going to distinguish two major ways this can be. So first of all, where emotion is the primary goal of what you're designing.

So eliciting that emotion is the very purpose of the product. So think about art. Think about games, entertainment applications in general. What you're trying to do is create a *sense of emotion* in the person. That's the primary goal. Other things are secondary. Now, in order to satisfy that primary goal, you often need to get *good functionality* and *good usability*.

So when you’re wanting to choose what movie to watch, you want to be able to find, perhaps, the box set that you know is there and the right episode of it as efficiently as possible. So you still have these fundamental usability requirements, even if the primary goal is emotion. But it's often the things that serve that. So think about again, if you're going to share a picture you just taken a picture of, whether it's a meal you're eating

or your cats or whatever else you're wanting to share, the sharing is about the emotional impact that you're wanting to pass on to other people, to your friends, and to your family. However, when you take that photograph, you want a very efficient, slick and easy process to actually get that shared on your social media channels. So, again, although emotion is the primary purpose of what you're doing, you still need the usability and functionality in order to support that process.

Alternatively, emotion might be a secondary goal. So the primary purpose might be something that's more, shall we say, business like. It might be about your work. So like I'm doing now, producing this video, it might be about office work, might be using a spreadsheet, using a database, might be about getting your money from the ATM and get the money out of the hole in the wall.

It might be about paying using your card in a restaurant. But the thing you're trying to do at that point, the primary goal is to get the thing done efficiently and effectively. However, typically, emotions help. They help in the sense that if you're doing, say, a repetitive job, then being alert is important. You know, this is true whether you're a policeman on the beat and watching out, or a soldier in a battlefield situation.

Whether you're driving your car and needing to sort of have a little bit of peripheral awareness. So emotion helps you do that. It helps you keep alert so that you're ready for things. So if you think about online shopping. Some of online shopping is about getting the job done and getting the thing purchased. But there's also an aspect of shopping, this is particularly true of offline shopping. Of when you go into a clothes shop where

the actual process of doing the shopping is part of the joy of the shopping. It's harder to do that online, incidentally. But there are some brands where that is the thing you’re trying to do. You're trying to create a sense of identity in the brand, a sense of joy in exploring it. So within the same kind of application area, online shopping, depending on the brand and depending on the person's need at that moment,

you might want to emphasize one or the other.

To create great user experiences. UX design teams use a five phase process: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. In the empathize phase, teams explore the problem they're trying to solve with the product. User researchers conduct interviews with people affected by the problem and review existing knowledge of the issue. The stage is about knowing what needs to be solved and why.

At the defined stage, user researchers turn their knowledge into a research plan and conduct more targeted tests. They'll learn more about their users and what they're currently doing to solve the problem. Then they'll put their findings into deliverables. Tools for the UX designers to reference when they start designing solutions. These include: user Journey Maps, to show how users try and solve the problem and present. Personas, which are details of typical users.

Affinity Diagrams of what those users think, feel, see and do. And "How might we" statements that list the problem teams are trying to solve with the product. In the ideate phase, teams ensure everyone has a shared understanding of the problem. Someone will then lead a brainstorming session where the team will consider solutions for the first time. The team will come up with as many ideas as possible, even if they're silly sounding or impractical. Afterwards, they will evaluate the options and choose the most viable

and effective solutions from those ideas. In the prototyping phase, the UX designers turn those design ideas into testable prototypes. These prototypes could be low fidelity, digital prototypes or even paper prototypes. The UX designers will do their best to make sure the product is intuitive to use and make multiple versions of those design ideas. In the test phase, researchers get participants to test the prototype and get feedback.

From that they deliver usability test reports to the designers. Who then make new prototypes based on that feedback. products will get increasingly polished and refined with cycles of testing until a final design is settled on. Then the design will be developed and shipped. You think it's all over here, but not quite. Product development is cyclical and non-linear. The product can still be revamped based on real user feedback, and in that revamp you may repeat some or all of the design phases.

New information could even set development right back to the planning stage once again.

There are a lot of fonts. If you go to a design tool, you'll notice that there are hundreds or dozens of different fonts. But most of them are useless, and most of them are fonts that you should never use. So, if you're just starting and if  you're not really comfortable with design yet, you should completely always avoid decorative fonts, handwriting fonts, and in most cases serif fonts as well. And I know this sounds really crazy and over the top, but most serif fonts are not really that easy to work with,

and you need to be able to set the spacing and leading, kerning and everything in the proper way for them for the digital interfaces to work well. So, it's best for the initial time that you're working on your designs to just *stick to sans serifs*. And I have a short list of fonts that are basically safe. There is a couple more – you can find them somewhere, but you don't really need a lot more when you're starting. If you're testing your design skills, if you're learning design,

a couple of these fonts are all you need, and especially right now if you're looking for a good free font, I would recommend Plus Jakarta Sans because it's one of the better-looking fonts out there, it's completely free and it looks good in most scenarios. So, don't use those decorative fonts, don't use those fancy fonts, because the simpler they are, the better they look. And another thing about font is that somehow people have this notion of thinking

that if a font is thin or light, it's kind of synonymous with minimal design, and that minimal design like the Swiss style – you know – super-minimal design was actually pushed by Apple at some point with iOS 7 if what I remember is correct, but they quickly reverted to that because those fonts don't really display well on most screens. They are too thin, and they are basically not readable. So, just *go for regular and bold in most cases*

and don't go  for those thin and light fonts in your designs. Because as you can see here, it's just a lot  easier to read the window on the right side. And also, if you're starting, don't create a  ton of different font sizes. You should have like a heading, a smaller heading and everything else as just one font. So, in practice this is another like a pop-up window that shows a couple of different elements, and we have just one size for the title.

And then the second size with different weights – one is bold; the rest are regular – is used for all of the other things. And if we switch it to four different font sizes on a small window like that, it's going to make our brain think, 'Oh my God – I need to process all that!' So, *just make it easy for the brain and just switch it to a much simpler option* because it's just always going to work better, and of course, a lot of the rules that I'm going to share with you are rules that you can break once you feel confident about breaking them.

So, *when you're just starting, just don't break them*.

Accessibility ensures that digital products, websites, applications, services and other interactive interfaces are designed and developed to be easy to use and understand by people with disabilities. 1.85 billion folks around the world who live with a disability or might live with more than one and are navigating the world through assistive technology or other augmentations to kind of assist with that with your interactions with the world around you. Meaning folks who live with disability, but also their caretakers,

their loved ones, their friends. All of this relates to the purchasing power of this community. Disability isn't a stagnant thing. We all have our life cycle. As you age, things change, your eyesight adjusts. All of these relate to disability. Designing accessibility is also designing for your future self. People with disabilities want beautiful designs as well. They want a slick interface. They want it to be smooth and an enjoyable experience. And so if you feel like

your design has gotten worse after you've included accessibility, it's time to start actually iterating and think, How do I actually make this an enjoyable interface to interact with while also making sure it's sets expectations and it actually gives people the amount of information they need. And in a way that they can digest it just as everyone else wants to digest that information for screen reader users a lot of it boils down to making sure you're always labeling

your interactive elements, whether it be buttons, links, slider components. Just making sure that you're giving enough information that people know how to interact with your website, with your design, with whatever that interaction looks like. Also, dark mode is something that came out of this community. So if you're someone who leverages that quite frequently. Font is a huge kind of aspect to think about in your design. A thin font that meets color contrast

can still be a really poor readability experience because of that pixelation aspect or because of how your eye actually perceives the text. What are some tangible things you can start doing to help this user group? Create inclusive and user-friendly experiences for all individuals.

Behavioral economics is an interdisciplinary field that combines insights from psychology, judgment and decision-making with traditional economics to explore how individuals make economic decisions. It challenges the assumption of rational decision-making in classical economics by examining how cognitive biases emotion and social influences affect people's choices and behaviors in economic contexts. In simpler terms, behavioral economics explores why people do not always take

the most rational or optimal decision, even if they have the information and the tools available to do so. Why do people often avoid exercising even if they know that it's good for them? Why do people neglect to save money or plan for retirement even though they understand the importance of financial security, especially in the future? Humans have two thought systems— one that operates with intuitive, experience-based and relatively unconscious processes, and the other involves controlled analytical processes

that depend on a person's cognitive ability, in-the-moment biases and influence from society. Human thinking is also naturally bounded by limitations in knowledge, processing ability and feedback. Thus, designers should consider users’ aversion to thinking too much and making informed design choices. The freedom of choice can make us feel powerless and frustrated. Too much information can make us feel anxious and overwhelmed. Complex decisions are taxing, even if we have enough time

to ponder them. We instinctively seek simpler solutions and subconsciously apply judgmental shortcuts, much like heuristics, to minimize effort. When accessing unfamiliar content such as an interface in a new app that's just been downloaded, users will base decisions on value judgments and context. Therefore, to help you users make choices that benefit them and achieve business objectives, optimize the information architecture of your designs while carefully considering the ethical dimensions.

Integrating behavioral economics with UX design empowers us to create intuitive and compelling user experiences. By applying behavioral economic principles, UX designers can present the right information in the right amount to engage and guide users to take the desired action. Design features in a way that simplifies the user experience and prevents information overload. For example, the "nudge" principle subtly guides users towards desired behaviors without restricting their freedom of choice.

Highlighting the eco-friendly option as the default choice on a website not only simplifies the decision making process, but also encourages more sustainable actions. This approach can elevate user satisfaction and also drive better business outcomes. The best design solutions always work in the users’ and provider’s best interests.

User stories are the actual tasks that are written on the cards or sticky notes in your Kanban board. In Agile methodologies, these are often small  enough that they can be done in a matter of hours or sometimes a day or two. Many teams write them from the perspective of the user. So, you may end up seeing things in the form of: 'As a _____ I would like to _____ so that I can _____.' To fill in those blanks just a little bit,

'As a *user type* I would like *some goal or action*, so that *outcome*.' And an actually useful example would be something like: 'As a *job applicant* I would like to save my *resume information*, so *I don't have to re-enter  it every time I apply for a new job*. The idea here is that the engineer who is implementing this user story knows not just what the *description of the feature* is but *what the outcome is  and why the user would want that outcome*. Sometimes the user stories are accompanied  by various types of design deliverables.

Also, some teams don't phrase the user stories in exactly this way. You're going to have to adopt the patterns of your team or work with them to come up with something that works better for you.

So feelings clearly matter in a user interface. That's why we worry about user experience. But depending on the kind of product, the kind of service, the kind of system you're creating, then feelings matter in different ways. So I'm going to distinguish two major ways this can be. So first of all, where emotion is the primary goal of what you're designing.

So eliciting that emotion is the very purpose of the product. So think about art. Think about games, entertainment applications in general. What you're trying to do is create a *sense of emotion* in the person. That's the primary goal. Other things are secondary. Now, in order to satisfy that primary goal, you often need to get *good functionality* and *good usability*.

So when you’re wanting to choose what movie to watch, you want to be able to find, perhaps, the box set that you know is there and the right episode of it as efficiently as possible. So you still have these fundamental usability requirements, even if the primary goal is emotion. But it's often the things that serve that. So think about again, if you're going to share a picture you just taken a picture of, whether it's a meal you're eating

or your cats or whatever else you're wanting to share, the sharing is about the emotional impact that you're wanting to pass on to other people, to your friends, and to your family. However, when you take that photograph, you want a very efficient, slick and easy process to actually get that shared on your social media channels. So, again, although emotion is the primary purpose of what you're doing, you still need the usability and functionality in order to support that process.

Alternatively, emotion might be a secondary goal. So the primary purpose might be something that's more, shall we say, business like. It might be about your work. So like I'm doing now, producing this video, it might be about office work, might be using a spreadsheet, using a database, might be about getting your money from the ATM and get the money out of the hole in the wall.

It might be about paying using your card in a restaurant. But the thing you're trying to do at that point, the primary goal is to get the thing done efficiently and effectively. However, typically, emotions help. They help in the sense that if you're doing, say, a repetitive job, then being alert is important. You know, this is true whether you're a policeman on the beat and watching out, or a soldier in a battlefield situation.

Whether you're driving your car and needing to sort of have a little bit of peripheral awareness. So emotion helps you do that. It helps you keep alert so that you're ready for things. So if you think about online shopping. Some of online shopping is about getting the job done and getting the thing purchased. But there's also an aspect of shopping, this is particularly true of offline shopping. Of when you go into a clothes shop where

the actual process of doing the shopping is part of the joy of the shopping. It's harder to do that online, incidentally. But there are some brands where that is the thing you’re trying to do. You're trying to create a sense of identity in the brand, a sense of joy in exploring it. So within the same kind of application area, online shopping, depending on the brand and depending on the person's need at that moment,

you might want to emphasize one or the other.

Let's start with a definition about what ethical AI is. What ethical AI does is it seeks to promote fairness, minimize harm and align AI with human values and well-being. And if I'm a designer and I'm working in ethical AI, one of the questions that I really want to ask is how do I design artificially intelligent systems that follow ethical principles and society. When we think about the practice of building AI systems,

ethical AI is that practice that follows ethical and moral standards in society. But it is dynamic, right? As AI changes, ethical AI must change to keep momentum and to keep pace with the advent of AI technology. So one of the big questions that ethical AI asks as a bird's eye perspective of what AI is is what are the legitimate and illegitimate uses of A.I.?

One of the things that we talk about a lot in ethical AI is transparency which basically sounds is exactly what it sounds like. You're allowing users to understand how decisions are made in the AI systems that they're using. So, this and this really what it does is it builds trust with the user and it builds that relationship where it enables the user to really assess how the system behavior (It has a behavior for bias and fairness).

And it really allows them to see, you know, like what's going on in the background when they're using these AI systems. There’s accountability, which is basically that the designers, the developers, the organizations, basically every stakeholder that has some sort of stake in the matter, whether and even users, they should be held accountable for the impact and consequences of AI systems. So this means things like ease of troubleshooting,

ease of understanding, maybe for errors are there how to address those errors. Like those mechanisms should all be included within the system, within the AI system that they're using. And then there's fairness. So, outcomes should be fair and equitable for users. And by mitigating bias and addressing disparities in AI outcomes, this can be achieved. Definitely, easier said than done, as we'll see in a bit.

But this is the whole concept of just making sure that things are equitable and that outcomes aren't biased or favored towards one demographic or one region or one area or person or industry based off of another. or one region or one area or person or industry based off of another. And privacy. So, individuals have rights on their privacy and data, right? Especially we've been through a lot of like consumer data laws. So, the whole concept is built upon like these systems have to be built

to handle user privacy and data in a secure and ethical manner. And information should definitely be obtained consensually, which not only means that, like me, as a user, I'm giving my data and consenting to my data being given. But I also understand what it means to permission a system to to have my data. Like are they going to sell it? What are they going to do with it? I should, as a user, should have a very thorough understanding of that. And so that understanding should be accessible amongst everyone.

That's basically the idea of privacy and ethical AI.

User research is a crucial part of the design process. It helps to bridge the gap between what we think users need and what users actually need. User research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about the target audience or users of a product, service or system. Researchers use a variety of methods to understand users, including surveys, interviews, observational studies, usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting and tree testing, eye tracking

studies, A-B testing, ethnographic research and diary studies. By doing user research from the start, we get a much better product, a product that is useful and sells better. In the product development cycle, at each stage, you’ll different answers from user research. Let's go through the main points. What should we build? Before you even begin to design you need to validate your product idea. Will my users need this? Will they want to use it? If not this, what else should we build?

To answer these basic questions, you need to understand your users everyday lives, their motivations, habits, and environment. That way your design a product relevant to them. The best methods for this stage are qualitative interviews and observations. Your visit users at their homes at work, wherever you plan for them to use your product. Sometimes this stage reveals opportunities no one in the design team would ever have imagined. How should we build this further in the design process?

You will test the usability of your design. Is it easy to use and what can you do to improve it? Is it intuitive or do people struggle to achieve basic tasks? At this stage you'll get to observe people using your product, even if it is still a crude prototype. Start doing this early so your users don't get distracted by the esthetics. Focus on functionality and usability. Did we succeed? Finally, after the product is released, you can evaluate the impact of the design.

How much does it improve the efficiency of your users work? How well does the product sell? Do people like to use it? As you can see, user research is something that design teams must do all the time to create useful, usable and delightful products.