Design Tools for User Experience Design

The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to artifacts design based on information technology. To make interactive system easy to use, user centered design approach is utilized by many systems. For user centered design, it is important to consider total user experience. But it is not easy to consider total user experience because user experience is including many aspects. To approach total user experience, the author proposes the method of designing for user experience that consist of "User viewpoint", "Environment viewpoint" and "Lifecycle viewpoint". "User viewpoint" is including several user groups from universal design viewpoint, several user characters and several user emotions. "Environment viewpoint" is including hardware product, software, application, space, people who is communicating. "Lifecycle viewpoint" is including pre sales, after sales, support, upgrade, setup product and application. To help this design approach, user experience design tool named "UED (User Experience Design) Studio" was proposed. Based on proposed three approaches, design tools were developed such as "The definition tool", "The evaluation tool" and "The visualization tool" for user experience design. To define user experience situation easily, "The definition tool" helps designer such selecting user group, selecting environment and input user tasks based on life cycle state. "The evaluation tool" is to evaluate defined user experience easily. And "The visualization tool" is to show the result of evaluation by 3 D graphics easy to understand complicated information. To evaluate proposed tools, experiment to make prototype was conducted and the results indicate that the proposed approach has possibility to help designer and multi-disciplinary team to consider user experience for user centered design.