This is the first course in a two-course workshop, in which you will deeply explore and practice every phase of the user experience process. While the concepts covered will translate to many kinds of interactive media (apps, digital kiosks, games), our primary focus will be on designing contemporary, responsive websites. This course is focused on the early UX challenges of research, planning, setting goals, understanding the user, structuring content, and developing interactive sequences. In this course you will complete the first half of a large scale project—developing a comprehensive plan for a complex website—by defining the strategy and scope of the site, as well as developing its information architecture and overall structure. Along the way we will also discuss: - Different job descriptions in the web design industry and where UX and UI skills fall within this spectrum - The difference between native apps and websites - The difference of agile vs. waterfall approaches - User personas and site personas - User testing The work and knowledge in this course continues in the last course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, Web Design: Wireframes to Prototypes, where you will tackle—finally—wireframes, visual mockups, and clickable prototypes.
Content and Functionality
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From the course by California Institute of the Arts
Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture
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From the lesson
What is in and What is Out: Outlining Scope
By now you should have a pretty clear idea what your projects will be about and who your target audience is. This week we will talk about how to take the user and client needs that you have established and create a set of content and functionality requirements from them. In other words, you’re transforming your overarching goals from last week into specific requirements for your site.
Meet the Instructors
Roman JasterVisiting Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art
So, what are the differences between content and functionality?
Why do we need two separate lists?
Well, websites, as a medium,
work in two different ways.
On the one hand, a website is
an information delivery platform that lets you access written text,
images, recordings, movies, and files.
Those are fairly straightforward and passive ways of interacting with the side.
You're mainly consuming information.
But that's not all websites can do.
Users can also interact with them to perform complex tasks,
like doing their taxes,
or managing their to-do lists, or buying cars.
You even have websites that let you create other websites.
This is what I'm talking about when I say functionality.
I mean, task-based systems that let the user get things done.
Not just access information like a description or image of a product,
but completing tasks like customizing the product and purchasing it.
So, the reason why we are making two separate lists for our requirements are,
that content and functionality requirements are fundamentally different.
Content is less complex.
Sure, texts will need to be written,
and photos will need to be taken,
and videos will need to be edited.
But for the web designer,
these pieces of content are merely assets to be incorporated into the sides.
Functionality is more complex.
It needs to be planned and it needs to be built.
It's a lot easier to make an "About Us" page with a few images and
some texts than to create a shopping cart or a checkout system.
Okay. Now that we talked about the differences between content and functionality,
let's discuss how the needs we discovered in
the previous strategy phase help us determine what to include in our website.
Let's assume that one of the user needs was,
to get questions answered.
What content requirements could fulfill this particular user needs?
Well, if you want to have your users speak to a real life person,
you could list a phone number.
So, that becomes a content requirement.
It's a simple one for sure,
but the decision whether to list the phone number or
not in the first place might not be so simple.
Does your client have the capacity to answer phone calls all day long?
Do they have an automated phone system?
There are companies and I'm looking at you, Facebook,
that purposely do not list any phone numbers on their sides.
Anyway, you might also give your users the ability to send an email,
if you want to give out your email address, that is.
Or they could contact you through social media,
if you are monitoring these channels closely.
If your website is for a large institution,
it might be helpful to list the directory of all employees so
that your users can contact the most appropriate person with their questions.
Finally, you might add a "Frequently Asked Questions" section to the site,
which has answers to the most commonly asked questions.
Okay. All of these are content requirements that fulfill this particular user needs.
Again, if you were working on a static medium like a brochure,
your requirements wouldn't be all that different up until now.
But we're working on a website.
So, what functionality can be built to allow people to have questions answered?
We could provide a contact form.
That's similar to listing an email address,
but it allows users to ask questions without leaving your site.
It also allows you to ask your users
a few additional specific questions that
they might not address when writing a free-form email.
Another functionality could be a live chat feature.
It obviously requires the client to have people answering the chats,
but it's a great way for customers to get answers quickly.
Or, how about a community forum where questions are answered by other users.
Or, keeping with the idea of crowdsourced content on a shopping site,
you could add the functionality for users to leave product reviews.
All of these solutions would require you to plan and
build systems that enable the specific functionality.
Let's look at one more example quickly.
Let's say, we determine that a user will want to know how much shipping will cost.
That's a reasonable user needs.
A way to answer this need with content is to simply
provide a description of your shipping policies.
If you have a very simple site,
maybe you only sell one product,
or if you have a very simple shipping policy,
maybe shipping is always free,
then this is all you might need,
just some text explaining how shipping charges are calculated.
But on bigger e-commerce sites,
shipping charges are often quite complex.
So, you could build a shipping calculator that
abstracts your complex shipping formulas into something intuitive.
Maybe a form with a few questions for the user to fill out.
The hard work of calculating shipping rates is then
done by the sites and your users will be much happier.
So, to reiterate, for each piece of
content and functionality that you add to your requirements,
you should ask, does this fulfill a client needs?
Does this fulfill a user needs?
Most importantly, you must constantly refer back to your strategy documents.
That's where after all,
you establish the client needs and user needs for the site.
Other questions that will influence your decisions are
about the feasibility of a specific requirement.
Is it feasible technologically, time-wise, and budget-wise?
In our previous example,
we talked about the shipping calculator.
That sounds like a great idea but only if
the client has a budget and can afford this feature,
and only if there's enough time to build it before the site's launch.
Sometimes you might come up with the requirements that are
just not feasible due to technical constraints.
You might want to add a full-page background video to your homepage to fulfill
the client goal of creating a surprising and immersive user experience.
But if you determine that a lot of users don't have access to high-speed Internet,
then this technological constraints,
a slow internet connection,
makes the requirement of a large background video unfeasible.
Before I wrap up this video,
here's a free-flowing list of all kinds of example content requirements that
gives you an idea of the kinds of things that could belong in the content category.
Most websites will probably need a logo and contact
information and some information about the company.
An e-commerce site could also use product images and product descriptions,
featured products, pricing info, shipping info,
customer reviews and Frequently Asked Questions.
A movie side would probably include the movie trailer or press kits, headshots and bios.
A restaurant would list the food menu,
ingredients, opening times, directions,
maybe the company history.
A school needs class descriptions,
the academic calendar, event info,
employee directory, annual report PDFs,
and may be blog posts.
A podcast website could post their podcast audio files and show notes.
A portfolio website would include an image gallery,
and case studies, and "Our Clients" section.
Some sites are required to disclose their privacy policy and list side credits.
Note that all of these examples have to do with text,
images, audio, video, and files.
Here's a list of example functionality requirements.
Some of these are pretty common,
like sorting, and filtering, and searching.
Others you will find on many e-commerce sites like a shopping card,
and a checkout system,
and an order history.
There are some functionalities that require others to be implemented as well.
Once you have user authorization,
you need to think about how people will create an account and recover a lost password.
Once you have user comments,
you need to think about the need to police these comments.
Other items in this list are less common like color correcting images,
PDF creation, and location-based content.
But what all of these items have in common is that,
they don't simply describe content but
complex systems that allow users to complete certain tasks.
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