User experience design

User experience design (UXD or UED) is any aspect of a user's experience with a given system, including the interface, graphics, industrial design, physical interaction, and the manual. In most cases, User Experience Design fully encompasses traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design, and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users.

History

The field of user experience design has roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that, since the late 1940s, has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. With the proliferation of workplace computers in the early 1990s, user experience became an important concern for designers. It was Donald Norman, a user experience architect, who coined and brought the term user experience to wider knowledge. The term also has a more recent connection to user-centered design, Human-Computer Interaction, and also incorporates elements from similar user-centered design fields.

Elements of User Experience Design

With the rise of the information age, many generalizations of the components have been based on the building blocks of the user experience design of digital systems. User experience design is majorly defined on broader topics that include talk of user's emotions, the appeal of a UI, and visual design.

Visual Design

Visual design, also commonly known as graphic design, communication design, or visual communication, represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any User Interface. Graphic treatment of interface elements, is often perceived as the visual design. The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colors, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. Fundamentals of Gestalt psychology and Visual Perception give a cognitive perspective on how to create effective visual communication.

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services, supporting usability and findability. More basic concepts that are attached with information architecture are described below.

Information

In the context of information architecture, Information is separate from knowledge and data, but lies indefinitely in the middle. It is information of all shapes and sizes: Websites, documents, software applications, images, and more. It is also concerned with metadata: terms used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, process, and organizations.

Structuring, Organization and Labeling

Structuring is reducing information to its basic building units and then relating them to each other. Organization involves grouping these units in a distinctive and meaningful manner. Labeling means using appropriate wording to support easy navigation and findability.

Finding and Managing

Findability is the most critical success factor for Information architecture. If users are not able to find required information without browsing, searching or asking, then the findability of the architecture fails. Navigation needs to be clearly conveyed to ease finding of the contents.

Interaction Design

There are many key factors to understanding Interaction Design and how it can enable a pleasurable end user experience. It is well recognized that building great user experience requires interaction design to play a pivotal role in helping define what works best for the users. High demand of improved user experiences and strong focus on the end-users have made Interaction Designers critical in conceptualizing design that matches user expectations and standards of latest UI patterns and components. While working, Interaction Designers take several things in consideration. A few of them are listed below:

• Create the layout of the interface
• Define Interaction patterns best suited in the context
• Incorporate user needs collected during User Research, into the designs
• Features and Information that are important to the user
• Interface behavior like drag-drop, selections, mouse over actions, and so on
• Effectively communicate strengths of the system
• Make the interface intuitive by building affordances
• Maintain consistency throughout the system

In the last few years, the role of interaction designer has shifted from being just focused on specifying UI components and communicating them to the engineers. Now the designers have more freedom to design contextual interfaces which are based on helping meet the user needs.

Usability

Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

Usability is attached with all tools used by humans and is extended to both digital and non-digital devices. Thus it is a subset of user experience but not wholly contained. The section of usability that intersects with user experience design is related to human’s ability to use a system or application. Good usability is essential to a positive user experience but does not alone guarantee it.

Accessibility

Accessibility of a system describes its ease of reach, use and understanding. In terms of user experience design it can also be related to the overall comprehensibility of the information and features. It contributes to shorten the learning curve attached with the system. Accessibility in many contexts can be related to the ease of use for people with disabilities and comes under Usability.

Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

Human-Computer Interaction is the main contributor to user experience design because of its emphasis on the human performance aspect rather than on mere usability. It provides key research findings which informs the improvement of systems for the people. HCI extends its study towards more integrated interactions, such as tangible interactions which is generally not covered in the practice of user experience.

Design

User experience design incorporates most or all of the above disciplines to positively impact the overall experience a person has with a particular interactive system, and its provider. User experience design most frequently defines a sequence of interactions between a user (individual person) and a system, virtual or physical, designed to meet or support user needs and goals, primarily, while also satisfying systems requirements and organizational objectives.

Typical outputs include:

• Site Audit (usability study of existing assets)
• Flows and Navigation Maps
• User stories or Scenarios
• Persona (Fictitious users to act out the scenarios)
• Site Maps and Content Inventory
• Wireframes (screen blueprints or storyboards)
• Prototypes (For interactive or in-the-mind simulation)
• Written specifications (describing the behavior or design)
• Graphic mockups (Precise visual of the expected end result)

Designers

As with the fields mentioned above, user experience design is a highly multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of psychology, anthropology, architecture, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science. Depending on the purpose of the product, UX may also involve content design disciplines such as communication design, instructional design, or game design. The subject matter of the content may also warrant collaboration with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on planning the UX from various backgrounds in business, government, or private groups. More recently, content strategy has come to represent a sub-field of UX.

Benefits

User experience design is integrated into software development and other forms of application development to inform feature requirements and interaction plans based upon the user's goals. New introduction of software must keep in mind the dynamic pace of technology advancement and the need for change. The benefits associated with integration of these design principles include:

• Avoiding unnecessary product features
• Simplifying design documentation and customer-facing technical publications
• Improving the usability of the system and therefore its acceptance by customers
• Expediting design and development through detailed and properly conceived guidelines
• Incorporating business and marketing goals while catering to the user

See also

• Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
• Customer experience
• Experience design
• Human factors
• Information architecture
• Interaction design
• Usability engineering
• User expectations
• User experience evaluation
• User experience
• User interface design
• User-centered design

Further reading

• Donald Norman: The Design of Everyday Things, ISBN 978-0-465-06710-7
• Alan Cooper: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity ISBN 0-672-31649-8
• Bill Buxton: Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, ISBN 978-0-12-374037-3
• Alan Cooper: About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design ISBN 978-0-470-08411-3
• Jenifer Tidwell: Designing Interfaces' ISBN 978-1-4493-7970-4
• Christian Moser: User Experience Design: Mit erlebniszentrierter Softwareentwicklung zu Produkten, die begeistern ISBN 978-3642133626

External links

• Usability Professionals Association.
• Usability.gov.
• Interaction Design Association