User Experience Design ...heard of it?

[D856C]

Every so often I like to post something about design in the larger sense, like how CSS relates to interaction design.

Currently the hot new thing is UX. The user experience.

User experience is more than just user interface design: it encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction.
-- Nielsen Norman Group, UX definition

Briefly, usability has established itself as basic best practice. However, usability concerns itself with frictions in task completion. What even usability guru Jackob Nielsen has acknowledged is the era of "joy of use" is upon us.

And so, lot's of people took to calling whatever they happened to be doing UX. It's not, of course. But you can get away with a lot if you call it by a formal term like UX.

So, have you heard of UX? Practice UX? If so, talk about what you think UX is and how you design (or would try to design) a user experience.

[PR Design]

Originally Posted by D856C

And so, lot's of people took to calling whatever they happened to be doing UX. It's not, of course. But you can get away with a lot if you call it by a formal term like UX.

I agree with that a lot.

[D856C]

I can see some background is in order. You may want to look through these UX Methods.

Keep in mind not one in twenty of the people blithely throwing the word user experience around even know there are methods, let alone employ any. However, some methods exist.

I use some, and have my own techniques -- for example Kansei Engineering.

To hear the critics, Kansei doesn't exist. ...Couldn't exist. Except it does, and has been around since the 1970s.

[kip]

I thought user experience design was things like Ajax inline editing etc.

[D856C]

Funny.

Seriously however, a little rule of thumb might be "no user ...no user experience."

And most of web design seems to have one rule: Let's assume about the user, but never actually include the user as part of the design process.

Think about UX as the real validation which determines if a client will be around long enough to hire you again.

Little story. On another web design forum, which shall remain nameless, a designer asks for feedback.

Okay, the layout is a good example of "spatter grunge." Color scheme: Blood Red on Black. All in all, not much to say except "looks good."

Now add in the client: Orthodontic surgery center.

I had to explain that blood spatter across the page is not right for the user: A Potential Surgery Patient. In fact you couldn't get more wrong. Unless you use grunge style, which symbolizes unsanitary conditions.

True story. And, until I pointed this out, the designer had clue none.

Related:
A List Apart, Ruining the User Experience Ajax is to User Experience what not hitting you in the foot with a hammer is to carpentry. Ajax is what Hamburger Helper is to hamburger.

Jeffry Zeldman, The rebooter’s children go rebootless "Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn’t so much that the designers had contempt for their users as that they seemed never to have been taught to think about users at all."

Ajax yes. Users ...not so much. And that's the reason for the "no users ...no user experience" rule. Ajax is far more Designer Experience (DX) than UX. Making web sites like not-too-clunky pseudo desktop apps is not a goal any sane user has.

[blueocto]

= lol

[zumojuice]

I think I get your point....

[Scriptage]

Ajax is to User Experience what not hitting you in the foot with a hammer is to carpentry. Ajax is what Hamburger Helper is to hamburger

Google Maps would work so much better without AJAX, people would love to have the page reload every time they needed to scroll to another street and being able to click and drag the map, well that just completely
ruins my "user experience".

[D856C]

Google maps didn't happen because of Google programmers understanding of Ajax. Plenty of questionable stuff has and will be done with Ajax ...usually because people confuse tools with what Google does understand.

What google understands is user interaction design -- specifically how users search. That is not not to say Google didn't put the available tools to good use. All ajax does is provide one way of reducing reloads, that does not guarantee a good user experience - as a lot of Flash developers have learned.

The reason Flash is 99% Bad is in large part confusing the designer experience with the user experience. ...That and the unfortunate tendency to confuse religion with technology.

Finally, web 1.0 was a horrible kludge. Berners Lee as much as admitted, if he had known anyone was going to use the thing, he'd have built WWW different. Making it the least little bit less awful is not good experience design, it's more like not hitting your foot with a hammer. And not hitting your foot with a hammer does not in any way, shape or form make you a good carpenter.

Just like using Ajax does not confer instant User Experience Designer status upon the developer. Confusing Ajax use with UX is like every Microsoft Word user calling themselves novelists or playwrites or poets. ...even the ones who will never write a book, play or poem.

The value of reducing reloads is totally nullified when what loads shouldn't have loaded in the first place. What's worse is if the developer thinks everything they turn out must be good experience design just because they use Ajax.

Related:
In a companion piece to Flash 99% Bad, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 2005: Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time).

For the record, I disagree. The tools are not the problem, they're tools. The problem is the mindset where the tools isolate the developers from users, all the while proclaiming the great user experience they're creating without doing proper user testing. Again, no user experience without users.

[zumojuice]

ummmmmm right...