What is user experience (UX) design?
It’s a very broad term, incorporating all aspects of a persons experience with something - it could be an experience with an object, something you touch, how you use your car or a website for example: the element of the item that give you cues as to what to do and how to use something.
“User experience simply refers to the way a product behaves and is used in the real world. A positive user experience is one in which the goals of both the user and the organisations that created the product are met. ”
In real terms, what does that mean?
You approach a door, pull the handle only to be greeted with idle response - it’s so annoying. Only then do you read the words ‘push’ next to the handle and carry out the correct action.
In life, this experience lasts a matter of seconds and has little consequence other than minor frustration or perhaps an eye roll or two, so why is this important?
When studying user experience (UX) design, this example is often mentioned as a way to make people think about the way in which things are designed for our use. A fascinating book “The Design of Everyday Things” discusses affordances of objects, these are the properties that help us use them - in the case of a door handle, it is the perfect shape and design for our hand to grip and prior knowledge instinctively makes us do just that. What happens when the affordance is misleading? We need instruction, which may not seem like a big deal, but the process of reading the push sign and then following through has a notable impact on the time taken to get through the door.
Now think about a website, the online world is impatient, a Google study found 53% of people will leave a site if it fails to load in 3 seconds. What if you have misleading content on your website: underlined text which isn’t a link, a call to action/button that does nothing or directs the viewer to a place they weren’t expecting, an email address without a hyperlink.
In the case of the door, you probably need to get through it, hence will persevere, but online… you simply leave the site due to frustration and go to one of the millions of alternatives. Read my 5 tips for self-built websites to help make sure people aren’t leaving your site due to frustration.
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