User Experience Design

011 min

The problem User Experience Design solves

Picture a company that runs medical clinics. It has just replaced its online booking page with a clean new design, and every reviewer approved it. Yet the front desk keeps getting phone calls from people who gave up halfway through booking.

A product designer is asked to find out why. They sit beside patients as they try to book, and they say nothing. The pattern shows within a few sessions. At step three, a patient stops because the form asks for a reference number that is printed on a letter left at home. Nothing on the page says the number can be added later, so the patient closes it and calls.

The page looked fine because the fault was not in how it looked. It was in what the service asked of a person at that moment. A visual review cannot see that, because the person is not in the room. Finding faults like this and fixing them before many people meet them is the work of the field this article describes. The same designer will now change the form, the order of the steps and the wording, and then watch more patients try again.

021 min

Where User Experience Design got its name

The booking problem is old. Long before websites, fields such as human factors and ergonomics studied how people use machines. What was missing was a name for the wider view, which counts everything a person meets and not only the controls.

In 1993 Don Norman started using the phrase user experience as the name of his team at Apple. Five years later he and Jakob Nielsen wrote down how far the term reaches: it covers every part of a person's dealings with a company, its services and its products. They also gave a test case. Take a movie review site where finding a film is easy, but the database holds only films from large studios. A visitor who wants a small independent film is let down, and no polish on the search page can change that.

The example shows why the name mattered. The user interface is one layer of what a person meets. The experience also depends on what the product contains and what the service does.

032 min

What User Experience Design covers

If the experience is more than the screen, what is inside it? A well-known answer is a list of qualities instead of one measure. Peter Morville published his honeycomb of seven qualities in 2004, and he argued there that usability is necessary but not sufficient. Each quality asks its own question about a product.

Usability is one row. Nielsen describes it by five parts: how easy first use is, how fast use becomes, how well people remember it, how many errors they make, and how pleasant it is. The other six rows are why a team that only tests usability can still ship a product nobody wants.

The work applies wherever a person meets a system: websites, apps, voice assistants, headsets, devices and services. A ticket machine in a station has an experience too, and it is designed or left to chance in the same way.

How an experience changes over time

One visit is not the whole experience. A white paper from a 2010 research seminar, published in 2011, separates time spans. Before first use, a person forms expectations from brands, advertisements and other people's opinions. That is anticipated experience. The authors name three spans of use: momentary, episodic and cumulative. A feeling can change in a single moment. After a visit, a person judges the whole episode. After months, they hold a view of the system as a whole.

The paper tells teams to say which span they are working on, because each needs different design and different evaluation. In the clinic, the patient who stalled at step three had a bad moment. If the next booking goes well, the memory can fade. If stalls keep happening, the view of the clinic as hard to deal with sets in.

042 min

How User Experience Design is done

The designer's visit to the waiting room is one step in a longer routine. Teams vary the details, but most follow the same run and repeat it.

1. 1

   Research.

   Watch and ask people in the setting where the product is used. The designer learns who the patients are, what they carry and what else is on their mind when they book. Groups of similar people are often summarised as personas, described people who stand for a group.

2. 2

   Define.

   Turn what was seen into a problem statement and a measure of success, such as the share of people who finish booking.

3. 3

   Structure.

   Decide which content and steps exist and how people move between them. This covers information architecture, which is how content is grouped and labelled, and maps of the steps a person takes, called user flows or journey maps.

4. 4

   Sketch and prototype.

   Draw the screens as wireframes, which are plain layout drawings, then link them into a prototype that people can click through. Early prototypes can be paper.

5. 5

   Test.

   Ask people to try real tasks while the team watches, in usability testing. After launch, compare two versions on live traffic in an A/B test.

6. 6

   Hand off and improve.

   Work with developers on how it is built, then watch where people struggle after release and go round again.

Design thinking is a general method for solving problems, and UX teams often borrow its stages. UX design is narrower. It is the work of shaping how people experience one product or service. The routine also costs time and money, which is the usual reason small teams cut research first.

What the international standard asks of the process

Standards bodies have written the routine down. The international standard for human-centred design, as summarised by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), starts from an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments. It asks that users take part throughout, that evaluation by users drives the design, and that the process is iterative. It also says the design addresses the whole user experience and that the team brings many skills.

051 min

The five layers of decisions in User Experience Design

The clinic fault sat in a layer the visual review never reached. Jesse James Garrett's book The Elements of User Experience splits the work into five layers, from abstract to concrete.

• Strategy: what the organisation and the people who use the product each want from it.
• Scope: which features and functions exist to meet those aims.
• Structure: how the features fit together and how people move between them.
• Skeleton: where buttons, controls and blocks of text sit on each screen.
• Surface: the visible look, such as colour, images and type.

Each layer depends on the one below it, so a decision on a lower layer limits every layer above. Garrett warns that when choices do not line up across layers, projects slip and costs climb.

In the clinic, the surface was fine. The fault was in scope, because the form demanded a reference number up front. Restyling the surface cannot fix a decision made two layers down. A team that only restyles will keep getting the same phone calls.

062 min

How User Experience Design tests its work

Back in the clinic, the designer changes the form and wants to know if the change worked. Testing answers that, and two ideas from Jakob Nielsen shape how teams do it.

Small tests find most problems. Nielsen reported that the first five participants in a study find about 85% of the usability problems in a design. Nielsen advised three small studies of five users each, with fixes made between them. He judged this better than one study with fifteen users, because the later rounds check whether the fixes worked and can find problems the first round hid.

Five is not a rule for every project. The advice holds for users who behave in similar ways. A site used by very different groups, such as children and their parents, needs users from each group.

071 min

Rules of thumb in User Experience Design

Teams reuse a few rules because sessions show the same failures again and again. Each rule answers one kind of failure.

None of these replaces testing. They tell a team where to look first.

091 min

Where User Experience Design goes wrong

The method can fail without anyone doing it badly. Two failures are well documented.

101 min

What User Experience Design is worth

Teams pay for the work because problems found early cost less than problems found after release. In the clinic, the fix was one field. Shipped to every patient, the same fault would have meant lost bookings and extra calls to the front desk. Guides list the same gains: more people finish their tasks, fewer need support, and more stay with the product.

Be careful with exact figures. Published returns on each dollar spent differ from one source to the next. Claims that design-led companies outperform others describe a correlation, and it is hard to separate from the other strengths of such firms. A team does better to track its own numbers, such as the share of people who finish booking and the calls the front desk gets about the form.

111 min

User Experience Design vs. nearby concepts

Four neighbours are often mistaken for it.

The 2011 white paper states the last relation directly: UX differs from the broader ideas of brand, consumer and customer experience, and each affects the other. It also says UX design is more than interface design.

121 min

Who does User Experience Design

On a large team the work is split. Researchers study people, interaction designers decide how the product responds, visual designers set the look, and writers shape the words in the interface. On a small team, one person does most of it. Titles vary between companies, and the same job may be called UX designer, product designer or researcher.

Programming is not required, though it helps to know what developers can build. The skills that matter most are watching people closely, structuring a problem, and explaining a design to the people who must build it.

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