What is User Experience (UX)?

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Kevin Matz

When users or customers use your product, application, or website, how do they feel? What are their impressions?  Is the product satisfying and fun to use, or is it tedious, annoying, or frustrating?  Would they recommend it to others?  If it is a website, will they come back again?

When we talk about User Experience (often abbreviated “UX”), we’re referring to the overall experience that a user has when they use a product, and this experience is shaped by the product’s look and feel, its functionality, and its behavior. A product can trigger positive or negative emotional reactions and feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Like “ease of use”, User Experience is subjective and can depend on the context in which the product is used, as well as each individual user’s attitudes, mood, and preconceptions.

The usability of a product is a major part of that product’s User Experience, but User Experience is much more than just usability. As a software or website designer, some of the factors that you need to consider in order to create a great User Experience include:

  • Presentation and interaction: Do the product’s visual design, branding, user interface, and behavior contribute to a solid, professional, and satisfying look-and-feel?
  • Functionality: Does the product do all the things that the user expects?  Does it do something unique, or does it do an ordinary task extraordinarily well?
  • Usability and learnability: Can the user figure out how to operate the product quickly and easily, with a minimum of annoyances?
  • Documentation, help, and training
  • Reliability, performance, and general quality: Users will be annoyed by a website that takes too long to respond, video playback that skips or “lags”, or a mobile phone with poor reception.
  • Accessibility for disabled users
  • Localization and internationalization (if applicable)
  • Security: Users don’t appreciate having their accounts hacked or having malware installed via your application.

For products involving the design of both hardware and software, the physical/industrial design of the hardware, the build quality, and ergonomics contribute to the experience as well.

In future blog posts, we will explore all of these issues. However, you should also be aware that there are further aspects of User Experience that are usually beyond the realm of responsibilities for the typical product development team:

  • Marketing communications (e.g., advertising, sales presentations)
  • Packaging (for hardware devices or shrink-wrapped software)
  • The acquisition experience (e.g., buying the product at a store, or downloading and installing software)
  • Pricing and perceived value: Is the product or service fairly priced?  Does it offer good value for money?
  • Interactions with staff members of the manufacturer or vendor: Does the user have to call a number to activate the product?  If the user has to call a customer support hotline, is it a positive experience?

Here are some more things to consider when thinking about User Experience:

  • Products like social networking sites and multiplayer games facilitate social interaction, and the quality of interaction with other users contributes to the User Experience. Sharing a good time with friends or meeting new people is enjoyable, whereas harassment or spamming from other users is disruptive and disturbing. Designers can influence but never completely control these interactions.
  • A product’s design can subtly shape or influence users’ behavior and attitudes. For example, an e-commerce site will try to persuade the user to purchase additional merchandise; user-contributed reviews and ratings can make some things look more popular than others. However, obvious tricks or scams are unpleasant and lead to a loss of trust.

Careful attention to designing your product’s User Experience can give you a competitive advantage. Apple, for instance, is renowned for creating stylish, enjoyable products with bold hardware designs and engaging interfaces, often with novel technologies and interaction styles like click wheels and multitouch screens. Apple’s approach to User Experience design actually transcends the individual products it sells – Apple’s entire brand is an experience, with trendy and inviting retail storefronts, and an almost cult-like veneration of its visionary leader, Steve Jobs. Customers eagerly pay a premium to be a part of that experience.

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What is User-Centered Design?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Kevin Matz

User-Centered Design is an approach to software design that encourages the active involvement of real users during all stages of the project. It helps ensure that we really understand the users’ needs, and it helps ensure that the product we design and build actually meets those needs.

Gould and Lewis’s seminal 1985 paper Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think identifies the three key components of the UCD philosophy:

  • An early focus on understanding users and tasks

Users should be involved in the project from its very inception. The designers and developers should have direct contact with actual users (or propsective users when a completely new product is being developed).

In order to be able to design a successful product, you must discover the users’ wants and needs, and you must understand users’ demographics, skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. For the design of hardware devices, anthropometrics (body measurements) may also be needed.

You also need to understand the tasks that the user will perform with the product, and that means understanding the relevant business domain. For example, if you’re designing a system to be used by bank tellers, you need to understand all of the tasks that bank tellers perform, and to do that you need to understand all of the terminology and concepts of retail banking.

In understanding the users’ tasks, you need to understand how the users are currently doing their work, and they might like to do things differently.

  • Early and continual user testing with empirical measurement

Early on and throughout the project, users should be involved in validating the user requirements and evaluating the product designs. This is best done by constructing simulations and prototypes of the product, and observing users while they work with them. You can obtain qualitative data by recording users’ experiences and reactions, and asking for feedback.

Deeper insights can be obtained from quantitative data. You can define metrics for usability factors like learnability, efficiency, and error rates. You can then measure and compare users’ performance across different versions of prototypes.

Continual user testing helps reveal usability problems and defects in your designs and prototypes, and helps you identify improvements.

  • Iterative design

The product should undergo a repeating cycle of design, modification, and testing, to fix identified problems, and to incorporate changes resulting from gaining an improved understanding of the users’ requirements.

“Build it right the first time” is a nice but unattainable ideal. For complex products, it always takes several tries to get it right. Iterative design strategies recognize this fact and ensure that the product is continually improved and fine-tuned so that the end product is indeed “right”.

A later 1991 paper by Gould, Boies, and Lewis added the following fourth aspect:

  • Integrated design

The various aspects of the product that contribute to usability – i.e., the conceptual design, user interface design, documentation, training, help system, etc. – are all tightly interrelated. They should therefore evolve together in parallel and be under the same management. It is too problematic to attempt to manage them separately and sequentially.

All of these factors sound obvious and self-evident, and yet they are rarely done in practice. In later blog posts, we’ll discuss how to structure projects so that they involve users and employ an iterative approach. We’ll also explore techniques and practices for collecting user requirements and doing prototyping and user testing.

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What does “easy-to-use” mean?

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Kevin Matz

Software vendors’ marketing materials brag that their products are “intuitive” and “easy to use” so frequently that we tend to ignore the claims as meaningless hype.

As designers, we all want our products to be easy to use, but it’s quite tricky to define precisely what that means. It is difficult because ease of use is a subjective experience, different for each individual user. It depends on the user’s skills, knowledge, and experience (both of computing and of the subject domain), and even their attitude and mood.

For instance, my accountant loves QuickBooks. She says it’s very easy to use, but she’s been using it for years. I found it pretty easy to get started creating invoices and paying bills, but I’ve used other accounting software and I took some accounting classes years ago. People who start new businesses and who have no previous accounting background might have a harder time using it; not only must they figure out how to operate the software, but they have to learn basic accounting concepts like trial balances and bank reconciliations. Somebody who has never used a computer before will likely be completely befuddled. And users willing to explore and experiment will have an easier time than those who freeze up in fear of breaking something.

While ease of use is subjective, there are definitely some products and interface designs that we can agree are easier to use than others. The definition of ease of use, then, might be compared to the famous definition of pornography: “We know it when we see it”. Still, it is useful to try to decompose the notion of “ease of use” into aspects that we can try to optimize in our designs. My initial brainstorming of the factors that make a software product easy to use includes:

  • Value to the user or organization: Does the product provide the functionality that the user expects?  Can the product help users (or their organizations) successfully accomplish their intended goals?
  • Quality of work done (fitness for purpose): Does the product perform its tasks competently?  (I would hesitate to call a income tax calculator usable if it incorrectly calculates your taxes payable, even if it has a pretty-looking interface.)
  • Explorability and discoverability: Does the product encourage the user to explore or navigate it?  Is it possible to determine the product’s available functions, discover any key concepts (like layers and transparency in a photo-editing application), and figure out how to use the functions to accomplish tasks?  If the user uses a trial-and-error approach to trying out functions, can the effects be undone?
  • Learnability: Can a new user figure out how to perform an intended task within a reasonable period of time? Can the task’s steps be easily remembered the next time the task needs to be done?
  • Clarity of model and concepts: Does the product provide clues that help the user form a correct mental model of how the product operates?  Do names, labels, diagrams, layouts, and so on help communicate the product designer’s intended concepts clearly and consistently?  Can users reasonably predict the effects of activating various controls or menu options?
  • Tolerance: When the user makes mistakes, does the application react gracefully?  Can the user easily correct or recover from errors and mistakes?
  • Low error rate: Can a user typically accomplish tasks without making a large number of mistakes, especially mistakes that could have been avoided?
  • Efficiency: Can tasks be accomplished with the minimum possible effort, in terms of thinking, doing (keystrokes and mouse-clicks), reading, and waiting?
  • Minimum annoyance: Can tasks be accomplished without annoyances such as lengthy delays, unnecessary steps, unreliable or unpredictable behavior, inconsistencies and surprises, excessive pop-up dialogs, intrusive advertising, etc.?
  • Satisfying user experience: Is the product generally enjoyable to operate?  Is it nice to look at?  Does the user leave with a positive or negative impression after using it?

For enterprise applications with a long operational lifespan, I would also include:

  • Usability sustainability: Has the application been conceived and constructed in such a way that enables future changes to be designed and implemented without degrading the application’s ease of use and consistency?

In upcoming blog posts, we’ll explore strategies and techniques for designing software products in order to optimize each of these aspects of usability. We’ll also look at how to test and measure a product’s ease of use.

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Welcome to Architecting Usability

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Kevin Matz

Arrow logoWelcome to Architecting Usability!  This is a new blog that will be devoted to exploring topics in User Experience design, User Interface design, and usability.  If you’re involved in designing and building software applications, whether as a developer, visual designer, interface designer, UX designer, product manager, analyst, or architect, I hope you’ll find the posts to be of value and I hope you’ll join in the discussions!

My name is Kevin Matz, and I’ve recently quit my job to found my own small company, Winchelsea Systems Ltd., specializing in usability and UX design consulting.  The company will also create and market software applications and books.

My first project is a book that I am writing and self-publishing. Titled Designing Usable Business Applications, it is due to be published in August 2011.  As I research and write the book, I will use this blog to record and refine some of my thoughts and ideas. Eventually I hope to post entire draft chapters, and I welcome and encourage any feedback. In the long term, I hope to create a dialogue with like-minded individuals – together, we can create a great resource for usability and UX design professionals!

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