Wireframing Essentials

Learn the fundamentals of designing the user experience for applications and websites

About This Book

• Get up to speed on the industry standard design process
• Learn how to architect your product with task flow diagrams
• Create wireframes with real world examples

Who This Book Is For

Whether you are looking to become a professional UX Designer, or just need to get the job done, the principles and processes discussed in this book will help you understand how to craft reliably effective and successful design solutions.

What You Will Learn

• Generate interaction maps and task flow diagrams
• Create wireframe design proposals
• Interact with clients who need design services
• Understand your users with by creating personas
• Establish design tenets that will help you stay on the right track
• Quantify a design solution using heuristic evaluations
• Ensure your brainstorming sessions are successful
• Get started with the design process with the help of user survey and focus groups
• Use paper prototyping and other testing techniques to help you predict success

In Detail

Designing the user experience (UX) for websites and applications can be an exhilarating and satisfying experience, but it can also be a chaotic and frustrating endeavor. The key to success lies in a thorough understanding of the industry standard design process, and in possessing a firm grasp of effective and proven UX design techniques.

This book is a comprehensive, yet concise, primer for those looking to better understand the core principles of UX design. It illustrates these principles with example projects, warns you of common obstacles, and introduces you to proven methodologies that help facilitate your efforts to find design solutions that work.

This book will put you on the road to becoming a UX designer by teaching you the process and techniques used by design professionals to create world-class applications and websites. This introduction to user experience design will instruct you on the required research and groundwork that will help you cut through the ambiguity commonly experienced when starting a project. It will show you how to turn the results of your research into task flow diagrams and wireframes that will be used to evolve your designs into solutions that will work for all of your customers and users.

Matthew J. Hamm has been designing visual solutions and interactive user experiences in the Pacific Northwest since the mid 1990s. Specializing in User Experience (UX) design and Information Architecture (IA), Matthew has been active as a full-time in-house designer, UX consultant, freelance designer, and entrepreneur. This has given him a comprehensive view of the many different venues in which websites and applications are designed. He has worked for and with clients such as Amazon.com, Atlatl Software, Microsoft, SumTotal Systems, Drugstore.com, Napera Networks, Target.com, ToysRus.com, BabiesRus.com, and Imaginarium.com. When not designing software, he spends his time with his family in Portland, Oregon. In his spare time, he is a linocut printer and gold panning enthusiast. He also enjoys kayaking the beautiful rivers of the Portland area.