All posts about
User experience

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

Is Marketing The Evil Empire?

Added on 20 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question: Is Marketing the Evil Empire? We were expecting to get at least a couple of embittered responses, but instead found consistent opinions that marketing is misunderstood and should be treated as a partner rather than an adversary.” (Jonathan Anderson ~ UX Magazine)

Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design

Added on 18 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have. Experience design has emerged in part as a response to this growing need we all have. It is no longer enough to design products and services so that they have aesthetic appeal and perform well. We demand a more satisfying broader experience when interacting with these products and services so that we more effectively pull out the true potential of these products and services.” (John Hagel)

The Elements Of Player Experience

Added on 8 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Video games are breaking out of the roles they’ve traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important.” (John Ferrara ~ UX Magazine)

The fall and rise of user experience

Added on 4 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
Closing plenary of the IA Summit 2011 ~ “Although there’s still a substantial gap between aspiration and execution, business leaders are at least now talking about the right things: experience, prototyping, design strategy, and innovation. (…) User experience converts are typically drawn to the glamour of interaction design on shiny technology, and the amateur psychology that helps them sound authoritative about their approaches. Most lack knowledge of basic information architecture, design theory and elementary programming skills.” (Cennydd Bowles)

Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX

Added on 31 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“An overall good user experience is an essential aspect for creating a successful website. The term user experience seems to be a popular trend recently, but how can we describe user experience and how can we make sure to offer enough of it on our websites? To keep it simple, user experience describes how users perceive a website, what kind of emotions they have when visiting a website, and whether or not they are motivated enough to return. This subjective experience is in a large part based on the visual appearance of a website.” (Sabina Idler ~ DesignModo)

Assume an Amorphous User

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Physicists often have to construct clean, clear-cut models to describe messy realities. They do this by cleaning up their concepts about reality, assuming things like frictionless surfaces, lossless mirrors, and yes, spherical objects. UX designers often do the same thing, assuming a spherical user (…) who knows what he wants to do and takes the logical path in achieving his goals. Our scenarios describe happy paths that lead to success for this user.” (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters)

Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“I’m very excited to be kicking off my new UXmatters column, Service Design: Orchestrating Experiences in Context, with this discussion of the value of service design to UX professionals. In my column, I’ll explore the concepts of service design and how to leverage its practices to optimize the user experiences our companies and clients look to us to create.” (Laura Keller ~ UXmatters)

The Materials of Digital Products

Added on 17 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A perfect example is developing for the mobile platform. A native iOS app will allow for much greater refinement in performance, motion and visual treatment, but there will likely be greater build costs compared to an HTML5 mobile app. Conversely, HTML5 will allow much greater flexibility in deployment and distribution. Both technologies have their place in mobile, we just need to know when plastic is more appropriate than stainless steel.” (P.J. Onori ~ Adaptive Path)

More, better, faster: UX design for startups

Added on 16 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Startups don’t have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn’t something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?” (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal)

Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed

Added on 15 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We’re supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed.” (Helge Fredheim ~ Smashing Magazine)

Innovation in Customer Experience

Added on 15 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The experience delivered by a product or service can be a source of competitive advantage and business value through innovation. Experience designers – using the empathy they generate with customers during primary research, and the understanding of the customers’ broad context of use they gain – are well-placed to be the source of such innovation.” (Steve Baty ~ Meld Studios) courtesy of jameskalbach

Where Innovation Belongs in User-Centered Design

Added on 11 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“While user-centered designers haven’t always been the greatest advocates for innovation there is incredible potential for UX professionals to become the champions of innovation and the leaders of holistic design. User experience practitioners are in a unique position to reach out to users and across silos in pursuit of a beautiful user experience. Furthermore, while innovation can come from anywhere only user experience practitioners are equipped to evaluate whether a user population is willing to adopt an innovative idea. Innovation is inherently risky, and usability can mediate that risk through testing. Perhaps greater consideration needs to be given to how innovative ideas are evaluated in order to avoid focusing on the first use, but there is a place for User Experience in an world where innovation is king.” (Jake Truemper ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

UX is 90% Desirability

Added on 11 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“We are part of creating an experience. We are manufacturing something that wasn’t there before. Sure usability is important. Yes, it needs to be designed well. Of course, it should function without a glitch. But, are those really what sell the experience? There’s something more intangible that drives people to products: The desire to use it.” (Francisco Inchauste ~ FINCH)

Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business

Added on 7 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Lean UX is an evolution, not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents. It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses.” (Jeff Gothelf ~ Smashing Magazine)

UX Trends

Added on 7 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Over the past few years, the term user experience has become better known in business, so selling user experience is no longer as hard as it used to be. It’s becoming easier to tell the UX story, because through success stories like Apple, businesses are beginning to see the value of great design. However, there is still a gap between knowing how to make UX operational and how to source and invest in the right skill sets to make great design happen.” (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters)

Research Methods for Understanding Consumer Decisions in a Social World

Added on 7 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Ultimately, the goal is to understand the entirety of the consumer experience, so we can make the most informed decisions about online strategy, content, and positioning. In this column, I’ll first summarize the findings from Edelman’s article, then discuss how we can apply traditional user research methodology to supporting changes in marketing strategies.” (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters)