ARMAN HEZARKHANI: The problem we're tackling
is that college students on our campus find it difficult
and time consuming to find places to study.
And our solution is a tool that lets students see
spot availability in real time.
Now, this is very broad.
We could end up building anything
from a mobile app that lets students stream camera
footage to a real-time VR experience,
letting students roam around the campus library
from their dorm room.
Now, it's time to design how users
will engage with our solution.
My name is Arman Hezarkhani, and in this video,
we will discuss interface design.
Welcome to the Developer Student Club Solution Challenge.
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Interface design has two parts, user experience and user
interface, UX and UI for short.
UX covers how people will use the solution,
while UI covers what the solution looks and feels like.
A lot of UX is research, and this research
is done in cycles.
The first step in the cycle is build.
The point of this step is to create a prototype
that you can learn from.
So don't spend time making them super detailed or beautiful.
In fact, most of the time, users will be most honest with you
if your prototypes don't look perfect
because it'll seem like the idea is in its early stages
and more malleable.
After you build, it's time to measure.
For this step, you should conduct some user research.
This is admittedly very difficult,
so here are a few quick tips.
If a participant asks you a question,
take note of it but don't answer.
Pause, then respond with another question.
Have two people from your team attend each interview.
One should engage with the participant
while the other is furiously writing down notes.
Don't ask, hey, what do you think of my app?
Instead, ask users to complete a task,
and take note of any friction they face in trying
to complete that task.
If you're building a calendar app, for example,
you could ask a user to create a new event
or delete an existing event.
Lastly, it's time to learn.
For this step, get together with your team and compile all
of the feedback to see what worked and what didn't.
Then, of course, it's time to repeat.
After you've completed the build, measure, learn cycle
enough times, you'll want to move on
to building a higher fidelity mockup.
This is where UI comes in.
When you're thinking about UI, there
are three things to keep in mind--
design principles, design elements, and UI patterns.
Design principles are things like information hierarchy
and proportion.
Information hierarchy is the arrangement of data such
that it creates an order of importance.
For example, when you're looking at someone's resume or CV,
can you easily find their name?
Can you easily find their work experience?
If not, the document needs better information hierarchy.
Design elements are things like color and shapes.
These may seem simple, but their use
can greatly affect design principles and the usability
of your solution.
For example, think about what it means for text
to be highlighted as red.
Good use of design principles and design elements
is hard to master.
Luckily, people have been doing this for a while,
so your users have been trained to use tools a certain way.
For example, if a user sees a square checkbox,
they know they can select more than one option.
If a user sees a button, they know they can click it.
And if that button has a little triangle on it, clicking
it will reveal more options.
This is great news.
It means we don't necessarily need
to be professionals in color theory
to design highly usable and even beautiful solutions.
We can simply make use of these commonly used UI patterns.
When creating any piece of technology,
you should start by identifying the problem,
then broadly identifying the solution.
We just discussed the third step,
designing the interface, which allows
us to decide how a user will interact with our solution.
Now, you have an interface, and you're
one step closer to building a great solution that will touch
lives right in your community.