What is the Fluid Design Handbook?


The Fluid Design Handbook is a How-to Guide filled with user-centered design (UCD) techniques you can use to learn from your users and design better user experiences.
The handbook includes information on a variety of UCD practices, from performing user research and creating models (such as personas and scenarios) to inform the design process, to performing UX walkthroughs and user testing of your website or application to assess usability and accessibility.  This is by no means a comprehensive guide of design practices but rather focuses on a few methods near and dear to us on the Fluid project.



Contextual Inquiry

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> Fluid examples

Interviews and Observation

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Surveys and Focus Groups

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Personas

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> Fluid examples

Mental Models

Mental models are way to think about what knowledge, experience and expectations users bring with them when they use your product.

> Mental Models, by Indi Young
> Interview with Indi Young

Journey Frameworks

Journey Frameworks (aka: schematic storyboards) map out the experience of visitors while they go through the various stages of the interactive experience. The examples listed below illustrate a museum visit to the Detroit Institute of the Arts and related kiosk or mobile situations.

> Fluid examples

Affinity Diagrams

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> Fluid examples

Scenarios

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Design Patterns

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> Fluid examples

Fluid Components

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Storyboarding

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Competitive Analysis (a.k.a. Benchmarking)

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User Experience Resources

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User Experience Walkthroughs

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> Fluid examples

The Fluid UX Walkthrough takes an all-in-one approach by combining the best methods of the other inspection techniques described in this handbook.

Heuristic Evaluation

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Cognitive Walkthrough

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Accessibility Markup Review

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Accessibility Review Protocols

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User Testing

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> Fluid examples


Accessibility Resources

Inclusive and Accessible Web Content Guide


Problem Statements and Design Goals

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Agile Planning - Goals, benefits and details

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Design and Development Process

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Ontological design process

The purpose of a ontological design process is it assists collaborative teams by providing a representation of the multi-scaled design space and points of overlap between disciplines. This can take the form of an illustration or a textural analysis mapping the relationships between components and attributes. This overarching view of the domain is used as a tool for negotiating the properties (including interactions) of the design space.

> Example of a Ontological Proto-models

Physical kiosk design process

The purpose of a Physical Kiosk Design Process was to identify the differences between UI and product design.

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> Example of preliminary research Preliminary kiosk research