User and Social Experience Design
It can be the subtle aspects of a user's interaction with a user interface that make the difference between a good and bad experience.
I’m one of those “user experience is mostly an umbrella, encompassing other fields such as usability, accessibility etc” people, so UX and Usability are somewhat interchangeable here.
A good user experience isn’t neccessarily that far removed from a poor user experience. It can be small, subtle differences that can have a huge impact.
As an interaction designer I generally focus on the small things, the detail such as layout, padding, margins, whitespace, alignment, relative sizes and positions in the context of tasks, goals and design principles.
Such things can make the difference between a user interface feeling clunky/messy and smooth/clean.
Also interface performance is important; a lag of just 50 milliseconds can make the difference between a dynamic control feeling transparent or one that slows you down just enough to trip you up and interrupt your flow; to make you think just for a second “Huh? Did it hear me? Is this thing working?“. It’s like a good screwdriver that feels right in your hand as opposed a cheap one that is awkward to use, or a hammer with a good finish on the handle as opposed to a cheap one that rubs and causes blisters. They’re both tools that do the job – one provides a good user experience, the other does not.
Content text can read well and flow, providing the user with the information they need in a way that makes sense. Badly-written copy can make the user stop, go back, read it again, then have to wander off to the Help for more information or worse leave the site altogether.
Instructional text can make a user feel supported or make them feel stupid. Something as simple as having the word “Error” in front of form validation feedback can make that difference. Then again, there may be times when having “Error” is perfectly valid and will help create the right meaning or instil the right level of urgency so there are no hard-and-fast rules.
Text placed too close to form fields can make the interface feel cluttered. Too far away and the association is lost. But I can’t say “8 pixels is the optimal distance” because it all depends on surrounding elements, the style of the interface and what feels right when its all put together.
And then there’s typography, which I admit I know very little about – but my friend, colleague and freelance designer Pascal Klein could talk for hours on the subject. That too is an important part of user experience design. I suggest you view his presentation from the Edge of the Web 2009 conference Beautiful Web Typography.
Because of these nuances, user experience design is not a modular, plug-n-play activity where you take “good” widgets from here and there and place them nicely on a page. The whole package has to work and be presented as one united, coherent interface to the user. It’s designed from the ground up starting with the experience design and strategy through the interaction/workflow process and branding design, finally arriving at pixels and milliseconds.
Oh, and happy World Usability Day 2009!
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Take the Book Depository site for example. It’s not particularly attractive but the layout of the checkout page just works for when I want to order with the usually credit card and ship to the usual address. Don’t over-cater to edge cases. I go to the checkout page, I can see my card, check the box, leave everything else as default, enter my CCV number (they’ve done a great job of making that step quite obvious) and then place the order. Takes about 5 seconds.
Small changes could destroy that flow. Having the CCV number on the left away from the Place Order button, or less obvious, making it harder to determine which credit card and shipping address are being used etc could slow me down enough to make it painful. Like my Zazzle experience earlier this morning. To be fair, I haven’t used Zazzle in a while so all my personal information was very, very out of date.
Was quoted at InspireUX, thanks!
You talked about “error” messages. “Error” messages are really necessary when they ACTUALLY help the user to solve the problem. I can’t stand things like “An unexpected error ocurried and the program will close. The error was caused by a wrong memory allocation at [ put yout big hexadecimal number here ]“. I can’t solve memory issues. That’s a coding problem or an OS problem. But what the hell: Why do I have to be aware of that if I can’t do anything to help ME ? That’s pretty much a fail user experience.
Yes, when the system or application faults and it can’t fix itself (though it rarely tries) then it should report the error to the user in a useful and meaningful way.
But a user not entering a phone number correctly because the website didn’t tell them to remove spaces – that’s not a user error, that’s a design fail. Telling users they stuffed up in these situations is going to irritate them.