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User experience

User experience is about how a person feels about using a product, system or service. (source: Wikipedia)

Tools supporting the design process

Added on 22 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Cross-channel becomes touchpoint orchestration.

Example: Touchpoint orchestration ~ “Consumers interact with companies in many different ways. They may receive corporate information through publicity in the media, they see brand advertisements on TV or in magazines, they interact with personnel during the buying process or at the customer service desk, they unwrap packaged goods, they sample products in stores, and so on. Ideally, the different design elements that consumers experience should work together like the instruments in an orchestra to create the overall experience. Just like the instruments in the orchestra each have a different character, the design elements do not need to be similar in order to work together in creating a great and engaging experience. Touchpoint orchestration makes sure that all different elements work together and in the right order, in order to create the desired user experience.”

(Experience Driven Innovation)

User Experience The Don Draper Way

Added on 22 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Is Don Draper (a.k.a. Mad Man) becoming the reference for all things and beyond? Used to be Peyton Place.

“Like so many things related to technology and new media, champions tend to push a bottom-up strategy. But, my point for this series is to complement the current groundswell by convincing executives and decision makers to lead top-down strategies that covey a vision for what customer experiences should involve. Then, and only then, we can inspire incredible UX to in turn bring that experience to life. Everything starts with defining a vision that articulates the view of the customer journey not just as you see it, but what it is that customer would appreciate, relate to, and value.”

(Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis ~ Fast Company)

More Lessons in the Art of Empathetic Design and Spontaneity from Degas

Added on 21 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Theatre and art as sources of UX inspiration. Just like “Art as Experience” (John Dewey, 1932)

“Degas may have said that he knew nothing of inspiration or spontaneity, but in reality, he knew their meaning better than most artists. More important, he understood the work that is necessary to make either happen. So, I continue to be fascinated by Degas, his process, and the beauty of his work. Therefore, I am choosing to get a little off topic to explore some important lessons from Degas and what I like to call his performance art.”

(Traci Lepore a.k.a. @TraciUXD ~ UXmatters)

The World of Services User Experience

Added on 21 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
We call this an ego-document in the positive sense of the word.

“Practicing user experience as part of a larger services organization is hardly ever just about designing the user experience of a particular product. Any UX professional in a services role taps deeply into the human-relationship side of the discipline of user experience. The world of services user experience is challenging, fast paced, and, in some ways, different from a lot of other UX roles. I will be sharing this world with you in future columns.”

(Baruch Sachs a.k.a. @basachs ~ UXmatters)

Convenience: The third essential of a customer-centric business

Added on 17 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Never seen ‘convenience’ as a quality attribute for user experience, like usable, useful or desirable.

“Technology and innovative design have made many products and services more predictable and efficient, the two lower levels of Different’s 7 Essentials of Customer Experience. Convenience, the next essential of customer experience, is a critical factor in determining how customers make decisions about what to buy, what services to use, where to go, and with whom to engage. Conventional wisdom says that convenience is a factor of time and effort. On the surface, that’s true, but if you dig a little deeper to fully understand service convenience, you need to consider another factor: perception.”

(Ari Weissman a.k.a. @TravelingRE ~ UX Magazine)

The De-Evolution of UX Design

Added on 15 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
InfoArch gets rehabilitated.

“By bringing the IA phase back and by concentrating first on the information, several things will happen. First, your sketching and interface design becomes much, much better because you have prioritization and buy off on the content, context, and users you are designing for. This means that your wireframe/prototyping phase becomes a lot more about the interface and not what content should go in the interface and why. Second, you are showing your stakeholders that UX design truly isn’t just form, but really is also about function. We are moving away from the interface, which is how we started, and towards a real solution of which the interface is only a part. Third, we stop lying to ourselves, and we stop saying that the best UX solutions aren’t just the coolest or the best aesthetically, but they are those that take content, context and users into consideration while creating an aesthetically appropriate interface. Most importantly, we stop UX’s slide down the evolution scale back towards the time of print design and outputs, and instead continue our climb up the mountain towards being the user experience experts.”

(Elisabeth Hubert a.k.a. @likehow22)

Why User Experience Is Critical To Customer Relationships

Added on 14 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
See, UX gets picked up by the ‘big guru guys’. Let’s see what they do with it.

“User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy. (…) User experience is now becoming a critical point in customer engagement in order to compete for attention now and in the future. For without thoughtful UX, consumers meander without direction, reward, or utility. And their attention, and ultimately loyalty, follows.”

(Brian Solis a.k.a. @briansolis ~ Fast Company)

Disruptive Innovation

Added on 14 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Or how UX and CX can be disruptive. Love the comments.

“A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Although the term disruptive technology is widely used, disruptive innovation seems a more appropriate term in many contexts since few technologies are intrinsically disruptive; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact.”

(Clayton M. Christensen a.k.a. @claychristensen ~ Interaction-Design.org)

Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity Model

Added on 6 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
The baby, toddler, teenager, and adolescent phases of UX research.

“An increasing number of organizations and individuals who develop software products, Web applications, Web sites, or other digital products are gaining a better understanding and appreciation for user experience and UX design and research. Subsequent to the introduction of some magnificent products and services that many executives now own or use-such as smartphones, tablets, Web applications, social media, and video games-they have gained a better understanding of what UX design and research can do to boost the success of a business offering.”

(Tomer Sharon a.k.a. @tsharon ~ UXmatters)

The User Experience Integration Matrix: Integrating UX into the Product Backlog

Added on 3 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
As long as we see UX projects as software engineering projects and not the other way around, the plus and minus sides of the magnet will not connect.

“Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design and user experience in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog. While both agile and UX methods share some best practices-like iteration and defining requirements based on stories about users-agile and UX methods evolved for different purposes, supporting different values. Agile methods were developed without consideration for UX best practices. Early agile pioneers were working on in-house IT projects (custom software) or enterprise software.”

(Jon Innes ~ Boxes and Arrows) courtesy of janjursa

UI: Getting the Details Right

Added on 27 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Why 5 and not 7, 9 or 3?

“User interface details matter to the overall user experience. Many users may not consciously notice these details on your site yet they do have an impact on the overall user experience. When everything feels just right the perception of your site and brand is improved. In this article, we’ll look at 5 different types of UI details you should pay attention to.”

(Jamie Appleseed a.k.a. @jamieappleseed ~ Baymard Institute)

Defining an Interaction Model: The Cornerstone of Application Design

Added on 23 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Or, on the value of working with models. Of any kind.

“An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. It is the glue that holds an application together. It defines how all of the objects and actions that are part of an application interrelate, in ways that mirror and support real-life user interactions. It ensures that users always stay oriented and understand how to move from place to place to find information or perform tasks. It provides a common vision for an application. It enables designers, developers, and stakeholders to understand and explain how users move from objects to actions within a system. It is like a cypher or secret decoder ring: Once you understand the interaction model, once you see the pattern, everything makes sense. Defining the right interaction model is a foundational requirement for any digital system and contributes to a cohesive, overall UX architecture.”

(Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters)

Global UX: A Journey

Added on 23 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Old borders evaporate, new ones emerge.

“In our increasingly connected world of 2012, we have more ways of continually learning to better understand, communicate, live, and work with each other, both locally and globally. The old boundaries, borders, and divisions are slowly disappearing, and established systems are starting to break down, making it challenging to learn what this new world means to all of us. When it is easy to become a friend of someone who does not live in our neighborhood or even our country, our assumptions about other people start to change. Similarly, the UX research and design professions are seeing a shift that edges us beyond the boundaries within which we live and work, forcing us to look outside our window when designing and improving the products and services we work on.”

(Whitney Quesenbery and Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters)

Positive UX: Optimal user experience is more than the absence of usability issues

Added on 18 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Less usability, more friction.

“In this article I’ll be applying a similar approach to introduce Positive UX; the idea that good UX isn’t simply the absence of usability issues. I intend to draw parallels between the fields of well-being and UX in order to illustrate the factors that define and foster Positive UX and the implications this may have on measuring good experience with the web.”

(Rob Howells ~ Humanising Technology)

Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as Experience

Added on 13 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Technology moving into the fibers of our emotions.

“As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users’ emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences. Here I will provide a short account of why in particular emotion became one such important strand of work in our field.”

(Kristina Höök a.k.a. @ProfessorHook ~ Interaction-Design.org)

How to Start a Career in UX Design

Added on 10 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Start somewhere, then practice 10.000 hours.

“Quite often, Web magazines, blogs, and other Web sites feature many interesting and informative articles about how to do UX design, graphic design, and Web design, but offer very little content about the fundamental steps that one must take to actually develop a career in one of these fields. So what should you do if you are just starting out as a UX designer, and what steps should you take to further your career?”

(Chloe Lloyd ~ UXmatters)

Customer Experience versus User Experience

Added on 5 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Or in terms of scope, service design relates to customer experience; web and app design relates to user experience. And what about experience design a.k.a. cross-channel experience design?

“In reading what they write about, it is disturbing how little reference Customer Experience people make to User Experience people. I’ve come across several references to human factors and usability, but you’ll almost never find Customer Experience and User Experience in the same book, article, or room. This worries me. It worries me because I think that actually, this is possibly one of the best, strongest alliances that could exist in companies. It worries me because so much of what CX people do is what we need done so that the experiences we’re designing have a real chance of being good. And it worries be because I think we as UXers could really benefit from understanding, in greater detail, a lot of the structure and discipline and business focus that CXers bring to our combined cause.”

(Leisa Reichelt a.k.a. @leisa ~ disambiguity)