Process Book Review

Study the exemplary process books displayed.

  1. What makes this documentation effective?
  2. What would you steal for your own work?

Prayer

[Name], will you pray for us today?

Unit B: Make It Better App

Before you can fix something, you must understand why it was designed that way

Today

UX Vocabulary
Nielsen's Heuristics
Mapping User Flows
Competitive Analysis
Project B Introduction
App Selection & B1 Work Session

By the end of today...

UX Language

You'll know the vocabulary of user experience: affordances, signifiers, feedback, mental models

Heuristic Analysis

You'll be able to use Nielsen's 10 heuristics to identify why something feels broken

Your Project

You'll have chosen an app to improve and started mapping its current user flow

UX Vocabulary

Core concepts from Norman — how we describe what happens at each step

Four Key Concepts

Affordances

What actions are possible (a button affords pressing)

Signifiers

What indicates where action should take place (the button's visual appearance)

Feedback

What communicates the result of an action (button depresses, screen changes)

Mental Models

How users think the system works vs. how it actually works

Nielsen's 10 Heuristics

A framework for evaluating interfaces — language to describe why something feels broken

The 10 Usability Heuristics

  1. Visibility of system status
  2. Match between system and real world
  3. User control and freedom
  4. Consistency and standards
  5. Error prevention
  6. Recognition rather than recall
  7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
  8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
  9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  10. Help and documentation

Think of a familiar app's friction point. Which heuristics does it violate?

Mapping User Flows

Documenting an app's current state — exactly what you'll create for B1

The 3-Step Method

  1. Screenshot — Dissect the app's flow into a series of screenshots
  2. Annotate — Add arrows or circles indicating flow between screens
  3. Describe — Write out the user's actions underneath each screen

Competitive Analysis

Learn from what others have already tested

Find 2-3 Apps Solving Similar Problems

  1. What do competitors do better?
  2. What do they do worse?
  3. Create a comparison matrix (features down the left, apps across the top)

Competitors have already tested solutions — learn from their successes and failures.

Project B: Make It Better

Choose an app that frustrates you, analyze what's broken, redesign the core experience

App Selection Criteria

Good Choices

An app you actually use (or gave up on)
Clear purpose it's failing to achieve
Focus on one user flow, not the whole app

Avoid

Already well-designed apps (Instagram, Spotify, etc.)

B1 due Day 6 (end of class) · Full project due Day 9 (Feb 9)

Bring index cards to next class!

Next up

Work Session — Choose your app (instructor approval required), map current user flow, identify 2-3 competitors

B1 User Flow & Competitive Analysis — due Day 6 (end of class), PDF to Learning Suite

Reading — Continue Norman Ch. 1 if not finished; read Figma's user flow article

Supplies — Purchase index cards before Day 6

Full project due Day 9 (Feb 9)

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