As a product guy who is constantly trying to dig deeper into user experience (UX) and user experience research, I’ve been asking myself how I define UX. So here we go:
This is your product:
It’s a magic box with wondrous things inside. But that’s not user experience. That’s just a box with magic features, viral pixie dust, and a pretty marketing bow on top. Your job is not to make a product. This is your job:
There’s an unhappy user out there somewhere in the real world.
Your job is to make the user happy. Share on XThe user doesn’t care about your features or how you make their problems disappear, they care about being happy.
(Ok…sometimes your job is not to make people happy…perhaps you’re designing a better water boarding device…but even so your job is still to make the user feel something.)
So you hope that you can make the user happy with your magic box:
…but that’s not the UX either. That’s the beginning and the end…what’s going on in the middle?
It’s not just your magic box product. Let’s zoom in.
Since I’ve always heard that designers make wireframes…let’s make some wireframes. I’m going to redesign BBC News with a special new feature:
In this magic box, we’re adding a special lolcat bonus article to BBC news…because…well…why the hell not? Everyone likes lolcats!
Is that the user experience? No.
An artifact such as a wireframe, psd mockup, or specification that does not include the user can not possibly describe the UX.
Where is the user in this wireframe? How does the user feel while going through this sequence of wireframes?
This is the user experience if we’re lucky:
UX is not just a description of the product with wireframes, mockups, pretty pixels, or even running code.
The user experience is how the user is emotionally effected by the product. Share on XWe hope the user has a good experience, but sometimes things turn out wrong:
Maybe our typical BBC reader hates cats.
Perhaps the user has just seen this feature so many times that they are no longer surprised by it and just find it annoying.
User experience is subjective and contextual. Share on XIt depends on who the user is, where they come from, how they get to the site, and their previous interactions with the site. Therefore the
User experience is constantly changing and demands ongoing innovation. Share on XBut perhaps you wanted a more official definition. (Not entirely sure why you’re reading this blog if you want something official, but ok…I can cut and paste with the best of them.)
Wikipedia defines it as:
User experience (UX) is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential,affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s feelings and thoughts about the system. UX is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.
UX is not the product you are building. It’s how people feel before, after, and during their use of your product. It’s everything from anticipation to satisfaction.
Stop building features and go build an experience! Share on X
