Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

What is user experience, exactly? In its broadest, most profound sense, it is an umbrella term referring to how customers experience a company, ranging from advertising and sales to product to customer support and billing. One can quite reasonably equate user experience to brand. In this broad sense, the profession deserves a corporate-level officer.

Most User Experience groups I'm aware of, especially within the wireless industry, are likely to have influence over the product and the web site. Granted, these are areas with complex information requirements, but they are a subset of total user experience.

I recently learned that a "major wireless carrier" in Atlanta is going to establish a user experience group. Bonus points for anybody who could tell me with of the wireless carriers in Atlanta - who adds 25 million customers per quarter - might be. According to this job description, this person will have influence over the entire out-of-box experience, including packaging and branding. This is a step in the right direction.

So what activities drive user experience? I think the answer in the broad sense is "anything that touches the customer in any way", and is not terribly educational here. So when focusing on products, UE activities include:

1. user or market research - feeds requirements gathering
2. user requirements analysis - can be done by a variety of user-centered design professionals, may involve personas or other techniques
3. features definition
4. industrial design - form, button selection, allocation of functions between hardware and software
5. information architecture - how the data is organized and presented to the user
6. interaction design - how the user will interact with the software
7. graphic design - how the product looks - white space, fonts, colors, graphics, layout
8. usability - measuring how well the product makes users' tasks easy to use or learn; can also include measures of pleasure of use
9. product engineering - software coding, mechanical design, etc.

I personally am expert at #2, 3, 5, 6, and 8. I am adequate at #1 and 4. I get outside help for #7. I work closely with the folks doing #9.

Keep in mind the above activities are only for the product's user experience, not packaging, customer care, and so forth. It is clearly a multidisciplinary function.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Business, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.