User experience design

Definition

User experience design is the practice of shaping how a person perceives and responds to a product, system, or service across the whole span of contact with it. ISO 9241-210 defines user experience as a user's perceptions and responses resulting from the use or anticipated use of a system, product, or service, and specifies that this covers emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors, and accomplishments occurring before, during, and after use.

The Nielsen Norman Group's formulation covers all aspects of the interaction between an end user and a company, its services, and its products.

Usability is a component of user experience rather than a synonym for it. A product can be usable and still produce a poor experience, and the reverse also occurs.

Origin of the term

Don Norman coined the term while at Apple in the early 1990s, where his title was User Experience Architect. His stated reason was that human interface and usability were too narrow, and that he wanted a term covering every aspect of a person's contact with a system, including industrial design, the physical interaction, and the manual.

The underlying field is older. Work on the interaction between human users, machines, and their contextual environments dates from the late 1940s in human factors and ergonomics. The term acquired general currency in the 1990s alongside the spread of workplace computers.

Constituent practices

User research. Interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, and observation, aimed at what people do rather than what they report doing. See Actual behavior and Emic Approach.

Information architecture. The organization, labeling, and navigation structure of content. The term was popularized by Richard Saul Wurman, who introduced it at the American Institute of Architects convention in 1976, and the practice traces further back to library classification work, including Paul Otlet.

Interaction design. The behavior of the system over time: what responds to what, in what order, with what feedback.

Visual and interface design. Typography, layout, hierarchy, and the rendering of state.

Usability evaluation. Testing with participants, heuristic review, and instrumented measurement. Standardized instruments such as the System Usability Scale allow scores to be compared across products and releases.

Content design. The words in the interface, which carry a substantial share of what the system communicates and are frequently written last.

Measurement

Assessment is difficult because user experience is subjective, context-dependent, and changes over time.

Hard factors, including load time, availability, and behavior across screen sizes, are straightforward to measure. Soft factors, including appearance and perceived simplicity of navigation, require methods that produce comparable values, among them eye tracking to record where attention lands first and in what order, and surveys.

The persistent methodological problem is the split between instrumented data, which records actual behavior in categories chosen in advance, and interview data, which records what people say and drifts toward what they believe they should say. See Etic Approach for the underlying distinction.

The profitability conflict

Designing toward profitability as the primary objective frequently conflicts with ethical user experience objectives, and can cause harm.

This is the structural problem in the field. The practitioner is paid by the party whose interests the design serves, and the person using the product is not that party. Where the two interests align, the discipline works as advertised. Where they diverge, the techniques that produce ease of use also produce compliance, and the same research that identifies a person's goals identifies the leverage against them.

Harry Brignull coined the term dark patterns in 2010 for interfaces built deliberately on this divergence, and the category is now addressed in regulation, including the California Consumer Privacy Act and the EU Digital Services Act.

Relation to calm technology

Most user experience practice optimizes for the moment a person is looking at the screen. The prior question is whether the person should be looking at the screen at all, and through which channel the information should arrive. See Low Resolution Indicators.

Douglas Engelbart posed a different objection to the field's default. His position was that optimizing an interface for ease of first use sets a low ceiling, and that tools meant for serious work should reward sustained investment. The discipline has generally chosen the other side of that trade.

Related Reading

• The Design of Everyday Things
• Donald Norman
• Designing Interactions
• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
• Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions
• Designing Social Interfaces
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
• Ambient Findability
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information
• Low Resolution Indicators
• Actual behavior
• Emic Approach
• Etic Approach
• Ethnomethodology
• Careers in Digital Anthropology
• Computers as Theatre
• Doug Engelbart
• Paul Otlet

External Links

• User Experience Portal
• Nielsen Norman Group
• ISO 9241-210, Ergonomics of human-system interaction