UserExperience

User Experience is a broad term for several disciplines that study the effect of design on the ease of use and level of satisfaction of a product consumer and makes the user's experience with the product the center of the design process.

DonaldNorman? coined the term User Experience in his early work at Apple Computer to reaffirm that the User should be at the center of all design efforts. This is often called UserCenteredDesign? (UCD?). It means users must be involved in the design process, by formative UserTesting. Summative UserTesting measures the Usability of a finished product. Formative testing during the design process influences the final design.

User Experience can be seen as an umbrella field that includes Usability and many other disciplines like HumanFactors? and ErgonomicDesign?, HumanComputerInterface, InteractionDesign, Interface Design, User Testing and Research, VisualDesign?, and Accessibility, among others...



For the web it is usually popularized as simply Usability, with Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability the canonical text.

The UserExperience Engineer belongs to still another CommunityOfPractice like the InformationArchitect, InteractionDesigner or ContentManager?. One community initiative is called UXnet.

For an extensive content review of User Experience concepts visit the IBM User Engineering site.

Acronyms for UserExperience include UE and UX, sometimes UI - UserInterface. UE engineers are also known as UXE, UIE, and Usability Specialists.
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The Elements Of User Experience, really the distinguishable elements of the human-computer interaction, have been captured in a diagram by JesseJamesGarrett?.



Time flows upward in the diagram from the early abstract stage of strategy, where the site owner's business objective and user needs are assessed, to the final concrete stage of VisualDesign?.

The two sides of the diagram emphasize the interactive WebApplication nature of some websites, versus the primarily textual, content-oriented side of the web as a hypertext content management system.

In a forced choice of terms beginning with "S", Garrett names the five stages from the bottom as Strategy > Scope > Structure > Skeleton > Surface.

His "Scope" stage is functional specifications (for interactive applications) and content requirements (for knowledge representation).

His separation of the middle Structure stage into InteractionDesign and InformationArchitecture has caused some controversy in each CommunityOfPractice, who worry that their work is being pigeonholed and limited.

Another mild force of the terminology describes the "Skeleton" stage (the home of InterfaceDesign? and NavigationDesign). The Wireframe is a skeletal tool.

InformationDesign is a general name for this skeleton level.

The surface level seems adequate to describe the home of VisualDesign?.


There are many more Usability and User Experience diagrams, notably a poster for sale from the Usability Professionals Association UPA. Lots of others are here.

NT - Usability.
RT - UserExperience Engineer, UserInterface, InteractionDesign, InformationArchitect, InformationDesign, InterfaceDesign?, NavigationDesign?, VisualDesign?




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