All posts about
User experience

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

Can Experience be Designed?

Added on 16 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell fluffy white papers, some use the slogan to hold pompous speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air. (…) Being an active facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning sales man or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design.” (Oliver Reichenstein ~ Information Architects)

Simplicity is Not Overrated, Just Misunderstood

Added on 13 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Usability and user experience design is all about making things simple and easy to use. I never would’ve expected such a contradictory statement coming from some one who co-founded the Nielsen and Norman group, a firm that offers usability consulting, training seminars and research reports. This statement puts a dagger into the back of usability and user experience design.” (UX Movement)

Design With Intent: How designers can influence behavior

Added on 13 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The central idea behind UCD is that designers create experiences based on a rich and nuanced understanding of observed and implied user needs over time. UCD grew out of a functional, usability-oriented philosophy that began in the workplace, but it has since expanded beyond the purely functional to take into account many dimensions of the user’s experience, including emotional needs and motivations. Using the UCD approach, designers are one step removed from the action. We influence behavior and social practice from a distance through the products and services that we create based on our research and understanding of behavior. We place users at the center and develop products and services to support them. With UCD, designers are encouraged not to impose their own values on the experience.” (Robert Fabricant ~ Design Observer)

Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design

Added on 8 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Of course verifying the integrity of the user experience is the role of the UX and design teams. While this may be true, many do not approach verifying all elements of a user experience with the same rigor as technical QA. This is in part because of easily made assumptions that once a design is near finalized or in development that it’s already been finalized from a UX standpoint. However, there are many elements of the user experience that need to be reviewed at this stage of the development process.” (Catriona Cornett ~ inspireUX)

On defining UX

Added on 7 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Information architects, interaction designers, researchers, academics. They are all UX professionals and not necessarily involved in the broad process, but are a cog in the machine. (…) Just like the debate about whether designers should be able to write HTML, this discussion is just not as black and white as every one is making out. There’s a whole lot of grey in there.” (Mark Boulton)

Why I think Ryan Carson doesn’t believe in UX Professionals, and why I do

Added on 6 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I think the reason Ryan thinks that ‘UX professional’ is a bullshit job title designed to ‘over-charge naive clients’ is because he’s never actually been in the position to need one. If you look at Ryans’ background, he worked for agencies in the late nineties and early noughties when the field of user experience was still in it’s infancy. As such I suspect that he’s never worked with a team of dedicated UX people.” (Andy Budd)

Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change

Added on 6 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“To accomplish the good intentions of persuasive design, we need to do more than design to get people to act. We need to create content that influences people’s thinking in a positive way, motivates them to act, and makes acting easier. As the UX design industry pays more attention to content, we’ll be better prepared to influence what people do and think—and have a real chance at making the world a better place, online and off.” (Coleen Jones ~ UXmatters)

UX design framework: Interaction

Added on 5 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Undoubtedly, interaction design is a design discipline that has become a defining element of UX. Though the preceding two quotes assert the alignment with a user’s behaviour they do so here in relation to their interaction (the person and the artifact). In other words, it is the behaviour of the object in relation to the user. The following principles reassert this notion that many interaction design issues are born out of preconceptions of what a user expects to be able to do with the interface they are presented with.” (User Pathways)

Designing Behavior in Interaction: Using Aesthetic Experience as a Mechanism for Design

Added on 31 August 2010 Peter Bogaards
“As design moves into the realm of intelligent products and systems, interactive product behavior becomes an ever more prominent aspect of design, raising the question of how to design the aesthetics of such interactive behavior. To address this challenge, we developed a conception of aesthetics based on Pragmatist philosophy and translated it into a design approach. Our notion of Aesthetic Interaction consists of four principles: Aesthetic Interaction (1) has practical use next to intrinsic value, (2) has social and ethical dimensions, (3) has satisfying dynamic form, and (4) actively involves people’s bodily, cognitive, emotional and social skills. Our design approach based on this notion is called ‘designing for Aesthetic Interaction through Aesthetic Interaction’, referring to the use of aesthetic experience as a design mechanism. We explore our design approach through a case study that involves the design of intelligent lamps and outlines the utilized design techniques. The paper concludes with a set of practical recommendations for designing the aesthetics of interactive product behavior.” (Ross, P. R. & Wensveen, S. A. G. ~ International Journal of Design 4.2)

Why Great Ideas Can Fail

Added on 26 August 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designers are proud of their ability to innovate, to think outside the box, to develop creative, powerful ideas for their clients. Sometimes these ideas win design prizes. However, the rate at which these ideas achieve commercial success is low. Many of the ideas die within the companies, never becoming a product. Among those that become products, a good number never reach commercial success.” (Donald A. Norman ~ Core77)

Emotional Design with A.C.T.: Defining Emotion, Personality and Relationship (1/2)

Added on 24 August 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In Part 1 of this two-part article, I’ll be discussing how emotions command attention. Then, we’ll dive deeper to explore how design elicits and communicates emotion and personality to users. Emotions result in the experience of pleasure or pain that commands attention. The different dimensions of emotion affect different aspects of behavior as well as communicating personality over time. In Part 2, I’ll introduce a framework for describing the formation of relationships between people and the products they use.” (Trevor van Gorp ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Personas: Explorations in Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character

Added on 23 August 2010 Peter Bogaards
“If we are going to begin to address these issues, we need to get at the root of the problem—our empathetic understanding of our users. Having empathy for users and understanding their needs doesn’t come from reading words on a page. It doesn’t come from statistical analysis of demographics either. It comes from truly embodying and experiencing the character of a persona, so it becomes ingrained emotionally and physically in our memories. Actors understand this. From the time Stanislavski began teaching Method Acting – a process of transformation in which actors begin to take on the true nature of a character – actors have referred to this moment when they realize a character’s emotional memory and have truly become the character as the moment of embodiment.” (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

The making of Undercover UX Design

Added on 19 August 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Writing a book has been the most complex information architecture challenge of my life. The permutations in which you can sculpt, exclude, clarify and link information are staggering. No surprise then that we relied on our familiar design process, heading up the chain of goals, structure, content and surface. We appropriated the tools of our trade: personas, content analysis, user feedback and deep iteration—but it was trial and error that finally unearthed the process that worked for us.” (Cennydd Bowles)

Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process

Added on 19 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“For most of us, the ideal when working on a product-development project would be to work with a group of like-minded professionals, each with their own areas of responsibility, but sharing the same overarching goal. Yet all too often in User Experience, we encounter unwarranted resistance to our ideas, making the product-development process much less efficient and adding to a project’s costs. The apparent cost of involving User Experience early and throughout a product-development process becomes a series of hidden costs, resulting from project delays, incomplete requirements, and less than optimal products that result in higher error rates and reduced efficiency for users.” (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology

Added on 19 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(..) I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit ~ UXmatters)

The ROI of UX: Proving the Value of User Experience Design

Added on 14 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I was recently asked to describe what a user experience designer does in less than 7 words. I could only narrow it down to 16: A UX Designer designs or enhances products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the user’s perspective. Pulling it all together, the tactics described in this presentation are intended to help you prove the ROI of UX. To me, that means: Proving to our clients and potential clients that designing their products or services with a holistic consideration of the user’s perspective will reap larger returns than other potential business investments.” (Erin Young)