Chapter 4: The User Experience


Overview

From the users' perspective, their experience is continuous. Your Web site, their browser, their computer, their immediate environment, and their life all interact and feed back on one another. What they understand affects not just what they can accomplish, but what attracts them to the product, and what attracts them to a product affects how willing they are to understand it. If a site is visually attractive, they may be more motivated to expend extra effort to understand and use it. If they feel it's easy to use, maybe they'll be motivated to use it more often.

Thus defining "the user experience" is difficult since it can extend to nearly everything in someone's interaction with a product, from the text on a search button, to the color scheme, to the associations it evokes, to the tone of the language used to describe it, to the customer support. Understanding the relationship between these elements requires a different kind of research than merely timing how quickly a task is accomplished or testing to see how memorable the logo is.

However, trying to look at the whole user experience at once can be vertigo-inducing, and dividing it into manageable chunks is necessary to begin understanding it. For Web sites (and other information management products), there are three general categories of work when creating a user experience.

  • Information architecture is the process of creating an underlying organization system for information the product is trying to convey.

  • Interaction design is the way that structure is presented to its users.

  • Identity design amplifies the product's personality and attraction.

This chapter will describe these facets by focusing on the research needs, tools, and titles of the people engaged in doing these things.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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