THOUGHTS ON USER EXPERIENCE
by David Evans
February 10, 2010

It seems every so often I change the direction of where I am going. Still always using my design skills but refining their usage just ever so much. I am an experience designer, or some call it user experience design. My designs reach out and touch the user and it is my job to delight them and exceed their expectations.

This is not a profession where one just gathers data but is familiar with how to gather it and knows how to use. I may perform direct customer research and sometimes work with teams to gather research and then put the findings together so it can be analyzed and acted on. Will Powley from Mad*Pow told me that experience design blends art and science. I love those thoughts because it really is the core of what a an experience designer does. Underneath design is data to support the creative effort.

But how can I take this new approach to design and weave it into the fabric of life, where so much of what humans see and do is a direct result of design? Here are some core industries I have served through out my career and some examples of how we can do better in them through the filter of experience design.

Product Design
In the 80's and early 90's my profession was product design. I have a degree in Industrial Design. There have been so many changes to this profession that are a direct result of two opposite ends of the design spectrum pulling on each other. The first is the high design product that looks like a piece of sculpture and just plain does not work. The product is sometimes difficult to use and along with that comes a high price to feed the ego of the designer. It is really a work of art designed for a museum. The other end is the product that is so poorly made it just can not perform up to a customers expectations except for one, low price. But even at that disposable pice I question its need to be. That low cost product just used valuable resources which are becoming more scarce and created one more product heading to the junk pile.

Somewhere in the middle we need to meet at a point where the product has a life long utility combined with a price that is affordable. Here is one example. The Proton clock radio. Many of you might not know about this brand but in the 80's Proton was the name in high end audio equipment. They manufactured two clock radios both producing excellent sound and offering an interesting design aesthetic. The one that wakes me everyday is shaped like a wedge with all the controls on top; each button is shaped differently so you can feel them in the dark. The plain of the wedge face houses the speaker and the LCD dial read out. It is a simple design doing its job perfectly and will continue until I am long gone or electricity is no longer used to power devices. That's the mark of great experience design, you do not want to part with it.

Web design and other software interfaces
Back in the early 90's my wife showed me a company called Netscape, she had just purchased some of their stock. "Look at this thing called the Web. These pages are horrible. You can design a better experience." And so with a little push my wife launched another career for me. I realized this internet and Web thing was going to be big. Web pages that were designed could offer a world of rich experience and provide a better aesthetic than gray pages and blue underlined links. Also the Web has a three dimensional quality to it even though the pages are viewed as two dimensional, there is depth to the whole Web experience.

Bill Moggridge, founder of IDEO a product design firm, integrated industrial design and software design. His thought process helped to define user experience. He realized his beautiful notebook computer was only as good as the software design it was running. Software has a three dimensional presence to it even though it is viewed on a two dimensional surface. From his work came a profession called interaction designer, a person who designed software interfaces. Software is very similar to a web site.

Another job title Usability, and its siblings such as Information Architect appeared, birthed out of the interaction design and human factors profession. These professionals will do a lot of customer research, behavioral analysis and present findings in detailed reports. Their work is extremely important when considering software architecture or the structure of a Website.

It is the experience designer who puts it all together in a visual design. They need to know about the other professions above and partner with each one using their information and expertise. A great Web design can only be accomplished by a team.

Experience designers look at a design through the eyes of a user. Most users are not concerned about what type of code a Web site uses. Instead experience designers will be concerned with: is the intent of the site clear, is it something the user group will do or wants to know about, how much time does the user group have to invest in this, and can it be done easily. If the site is e-commerce is the product easy to find and can it be purchased easily.

The experience designer puts the enter package into a pleasing visual. More than just a pretty face the experience designer helps bring the needs of the user group into the design. Form follows function, a principle associated with modern architecture and industrial design, where the design of an object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose is an important principle of expereince design and most importantly for Web design.

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