The Complete Guide to User Experience — Part 1

The Complete Guide to User Experience is a multi-part publication series outlining ways that can help you know more about user experience. This is the first article in the series.

We’ve all had good and bad experiences with products that we use in our daily lives. So let’s think for a minute about what makes an experience good and what makes an experience not so good.
When we think about a good experience, what are some words that we might use to describe it?

We might say that a product is useful and that it helps us in accomplishing something that we need to do. We might say that it’s easy to learn or that it’s easy to figure out how to get things done with it. Its high accessibility, we want it on our favorite device like mobile phone, tablet, desktop or even a watch. Perhaps it’s attractive or it’s pleasant to look at and interact with. It might even, in some cases, be fun to interact with or help us feel more connected to other people or to the organization that’s providing the service or the product.

And in the end, a good user experience is satisfying.

What about a bad user experience?

Well, we might think of a bad user experience as one that’s stressful, one where we don’t really know how to use the system to accomplish a particular task. We’re not sure which way to go or how to use the different features that are available. Maybe it’s ugly or maybe it works okay but it’s just kind of unpleasant to look at. In plain words, it’s not enjoyable and it’s distracting. Or perhaps it forces us to engage with features that don’t help us in accomplishing what we want to do and therefore it’s inefficient.

It might be the case that the whole process is tedious and it takes too long to do things. It can also be the case where a system forces us to re-enter information that we’ve already given it. Some systems can even be condescending.

They force us to do things in ways that don’t take advantage of our knowledge, our skills, and our abilities. Some systems can feel inconsiderate and don’t allow us to do things the way that we want to do them.They force us to do it the way that their system has decided things should work. We leave the experience feeling worse than we did when we started.

And, in the end, a bad user experience is frustrating.

Well, why does it matter?

Of course, we’d all like to have good user experiences and as designers of products, we would like to deliver good experiences. But, there’s more to it than that. When you’re designing a system you’re trying to solve a problem that your users have but at the same time, you’re also trying to accomplish goals that drove you to design the system in the first place. These goals might be getting people to visit your website or buy your product or use your service to buy other products.

While helping the user achieve their goal, it’s important that your user’s experience is successful, so that you meet your product goals as well. Additionally, if your users experiences success, they’re much more likely to come back and do it again. And they’re also much more likely to recommend your product to others to create a kind of virtuous cycle. Where not only are they coming back and using the system to do whatever they want but they’re also getting other people to try it out as well.

Let’s go through a couple of examples here. Take the example of Amazon. A huge online retailer that sells pretty much everything under the sun.

Why is it important to Amazon that users have a good experience when they visit their site?

Well the answer, initially, is pretty obvious. Their goal is to get you to buy stuff through Amazon and If you’re not successful at buying stuff, they won’t be successful as a company. They also want you to enjoy the stuff that you get. They want you to have a successful experience. Not just in the process of buying it, but with actually using whatever it is that you get.

They want to make sure that you have enough information to get the right thing and to do this they show you recommendations, reviews, product information and all things like that.
If you enjoy the experience and consequently the products that you buy through Amazon, you’re much more likely to come back again and buy more stuff in the future. What’s more is that you’re also more likely to recommend Amazon to others when they need to buy something.

Let’s look at one more example here.

This is a digital glucometer. It’s a device that’s used by people to measure their blood glucose level which is very important for keeping a check on their health. This helps people in determining what is safe for them to eat, whether they have to take an insulin dose to balance their blood sugar and so on and so forth.

So why is it important for the manufacturers of this device to ensure that users have a good user experience?

Well, a critical goal, with a device like this, is to improve its user’s health, to make sure that users are successful at finding out what their health status is so that they can make the right decisions regarding their health in their lives. Of course, it is very important for a product like this to make sure that they do no harm. So on the side of safety where other design considerations might be in tension with each other, it is also important not just to convince users that this is a product that will give them a positive user experience but also to convince the health providers and insurers that it is a safe device.

They also have to convey that this is a device that will result in a better health outcome for the people that need to use it and again, like with other types of products, if the users are successful at having a positive user experience, they’re much more likely to recommend it to others who have a similar need.

When we talk about user experience, we’re actually talking about the experience people have when they interact with your product across the board. That means, of course, using the product, but it also means other things like, choosing the product from among the myriad of other products that might be out there, acquiring the product i.e. how do they actually go from selecting the product to getting it in their hands so that they can actually use it or whether it’s accessible via a web browser or downloading it or purchasing it in the store.

It also includes the experience of learning to use the product, getting from that point of acquiring it in the first place to actually being productive and experiencing success with it.

User experience also includes fixing the product. Not everything works out of the box. Perhaps it’s because someone is understanding how to use the product or maybe the product is broken. It needs to be fixed.

User experience also means upgrading the product, purchasing the next product or starting to use the next version of the product and so on and so forth. And, it includes many other things as well. And these are just a few examples.

The proverbial question: Why is user experience hard?

We know what a good user experience should look like, we know what we want to avoid but why is it not always easy to do this?

One of the reasons that it’s hard is that you as the designer are not the user. Even if you are a potential user of this product, you don’t represent all the users and it’s very important to go out and understand who the users are, what they need and how they work so that you can design effectively for them.

Another reason UX is considered hard is because most of the time in UX we’re dealing with a software. We’re dealing with computer-based interactive systems. And computers think differently than people do. So translating what works, what’s easy to do for computer programmers and what’s easy for computers to do into what makes sense for users is a big part of what we do in UX.

It is challenging. We often get it wrong the first time and we have to go through many cycles to get it right. And the products that we’re designing are usually quite complex because of the fact that they’re software based and it’s so easy to add new features.

So helping keep a focus on the user experience and what users really need is a critical part and it can often be very challenging, especially when designing larger and more complex systems. Fortunately, in user experience, we have techniques that we know work to help make user experience easy.

First, we follow an Iterative prototyping process.

Rather than trying to get everything perfect right out of the gate, we try to use techniques that allow us to fail fast and learn from our mistakes.

We do that by applying user-centered research and design methods. We have a whole set of these methods that, we know, will work to keep the design on track and make sure that we’re designing something that’s going to end up delivering a good user experience. It helps to understand a bit about human behavior.

You don’t need to have a degree in psychology in order to design good user experiences but it is helpful to know a little bit about how people work and what we know will help them accomplish their tasks. Ultimately, we do all of this to allow us to apply common sense.

By following an iterative prototyping process that user-centered research and design methods and knowing a bit about human behavior, we’re in a much better position to use our own common sense to make good decisions when designing systems.

More on this process in the next part. Coming Soon…

Thank you for reading this, Let’s follow an iterative process, by asking questions in the comment section below so that we together can come out with a product that delivers a great user experience