Hot Topics in Higher Ed: User Experience

This is the first post in a series highlighting important higher education topics discussed in the mStoner blog and Higher Ed Live’s weekly shows. 

First, let’s get a few things straight:

What is User Experience? As defined by UsabilityFirst.com, “it is the totality of the experience of a user when visiting a website. Their impressions and feelings. Whether they’re successful. Whether they enjoy themselves. Whether they feel like coming back again. The extent to which they encounter problems, confusions, and bugs.”

Why is UX a hot topic? Susan T. Evans said it best in her blog post Will Mobile Experience Fix the Web?, “User experience matters. It mattered when the web was young and it still does. Who doesn’t at least give lip service to usability? The overused phrase, ‘It needs to be more intuitive’ is right up there with ‘Actions speak louder than words.’ ”

Want to learn more about UX? Below is a collection of valuable blog posts and Higher Ed Live episodes, all of which give more than just “lip service” to the importance of usability and user experience.

UX 101: User Experience

Amy Jorgensen, host of Marketing Live, leads this show on getting started with UX and provides insight into best practices and UX measurement.

• Key takeaways:
  • User experiences go beyond technology. Are they meaningful, useable, and human?
  • After UX research, synthesize the feedback & create journey maps. (Senior strategist Voltaire Miran can help you there!)

UX: A Reintroduction

In this post from the mStoner blog, Doug Gapinski shares the basics of user experience and great resources for further reading on the topic.

• Key takeaways:
  • The definition of UX: “all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
  • Additional resource: The 6 core disciplines of UX.
  • UX is a holistic framework for thinking about product development, communications projects, or web work.

Higher Ed Info: The Importance of IA in UX

In this episode of Higher Ed Live, Fran Zablocki and Nick DeNardis joined host Ashley Budd to discuss the importance of information architecture (IA) for an optimized user experience (UX).

• Key takeaways:
  • How do you explain information architecture to your mom? “Mom, I’m like a digital librarian.”  IA is like the dewey decimal system — organizing and labeling info in a way that’s easy to understand.
  • IA best practice: try to anticipate as many pathways as possible, and design sound systems for each potential browsing path.
  • Every page is a homepage. Especially when 70% of entrances are interior pages.
  • Your ideal user isn’t “everyone.” You should be able to pinpoint a few specific types of users.
  • No matter what your lens into UX is, you’ve got to be thinking about multiple devices and how they’re going to be consistent.
  • If you’re doing it right, your information architecture document is always going to change.

Higher Ed Live, produced by mStoner, is a network of live weekly web shows about higher education.