Ogilvy hosts UX Masterclass workshop

Ogilvy hosts UX Masterclass Workshop by Elena Dotcheva | 16 February 2012 | 0 Comments

rian-van-der-merwe On Friday I attended the UX Masterclass Workshop hosted by Ogilvy Digital Marketing Academy in Cape Town. The workshop began in a very fun and light tone and although the though of working in groups felt pressurising, it quickly made me feel very relaxed.

What is UX?

“User experience (UX) is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.” - Wikipedia

Rian van der Merwe conducted the workshop focusing on how to make a user-friendly website. The class began and everyone was put into small groups. Rian commenced the workshop explaining the four main focus points for his presentation: User Research, Content Strategy, Interaction Design and Visual Design.

Each group had to select a company’s website to work with for the duration of the workshop. Our group selected Incredible Connection. We then had to work within our groups to fix each of the 4 chosen areas.

The 4 focus points:

User Research: Comprises multiple methods for gaining insight into user needs and behaviours from real end users.

With this task we had to look at the website and decide, “What is the website there for and what is its purpose?” We had to explain what the main issues were with the site and what improvements could be made.

Content Strategy: Content strategy has been described as "…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance." and "a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project."

With regards to content strategy we had to find the product voice statement of Incredible Connection (Who Incredible Connection is to their users). We then had to look for the personality traits of Incredible Connection and decide what tone they use on their website. Once we had collected this information we were asked to select a section of the website and change the tone of that particular section.

Interaction Design: In design, human–computer interaction and software development - Interaction Design, often abbreviated "IxD" is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services.

With regards to this point we had use the list below as type of check list to see what was missing on the website.

Visibility of system status!
Match between system and the real world!
User control and freedom!
Consistency and standards!
Error prevention!
Recognition rather than recall!
Flexibility and efficiency of use!
Aesthetic and minimalist design!
Help users recognize and recover from errors!
Help and documentation!

Visual Design: in the context of web design, is the practice of applying corporate identity, style, imagery, iconography, typography and animation to an interface.

Balance!
Proximity!
Alignment!
Consistency!
Contrast!
White space

Once again we had to select an area of our chosen website and then compare these points to the website and pinpoint how we could improve the website by drawing a wireframe of the changes made.

I really enjoyed the group work and meeting some new people. I thought the speaker's approach was ironically enough very “user-friendly” and was extremely well received by the group. I definitely have more knowledge now on what should and shouldn’t be put onto a website. I also learnt that one needs to do more research in the beginning before rushing into design. I may have been a bit nervous to work in a group at first but in the end I felt confident in my own knowledge and was quite surprised at how much I understand.

My Blog