What UX is Really About

Introducing a Mindset for Great Experiences

Celia Hodent

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000518252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Programmation de jeux

"In this not-too-long and easy-to-read book, author Celia Hodent presents a clear overview of the challenges, demands, and rewards of becoming a user experience professional. If this field interests you, there's no better place to start than with the volume you now hold in your hand."

Alan Cooper, Ancestry Thinker, Software Alchemist, Regenerative Rancher, Author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

The main objective of What UX is Really About: Introducing a Mindset for Great Experiences is to provide a quick introduction to user experience (UX 101) for students, professionals, or simply curious readers who want to understand this trendy yet commonly misunderstood practice better. Readers will learn that UX is much more than a set of techniques, guidelines, and tools. It is a mindset; a philosophy that takes the perspective of the humans that will use a product. It is about solving their problems, offering them a pleasurable experience, and building a win-win, long-lasting relationship between them and the company developing the product. Above all, it is about improving people's lives with technology. What UX is Really About is informative, concise, and provides readers with a high-level overview of the science, design, and methodologies of UX.

KEY FEATURES:

• The most approachable and concise introduction book about UX.

• Easy to read and aims to popularize the UX mindset while debunking its main misconceptions.

• Small format size makes it easy to carry around.

• Includes content relatable and meaningful to the readers by taking many examples from everyday life with a conversational and light writing style.

• Tackles the psychology, design, research, process, strategy, and ethics behind offering the best experience with products, systems, or services.

• Includes a glossary.

Celia Hodent holds a PhD in psychology, and is a leading expert in the application of cognitive science and psychology to product development, with over 13 years of experience in the development of UX strategy in video game studios, such as Ubisoft, LucasArts, and Epic Games ( Fortnite ). She currently leads an independent UX consultancy, working with a wide range of international media and enterprise companies to help ensure their products are engaging, successful, and respectful of users. Celia conducts workshops and provides guidance on the topics of game-based UX, playful learning ("gamification"), ethics, implicit biases, and inclusion in tech. Celia is the author of The Gamer's Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Video Game Design and The Psychology of Video Games.

1 What Is UX?

DOI: 10.1201/9781003215370-2

Most user experience professionals define UX as a philosophy, an approach, or a mindset. When one uses the term “UX,” one implies caring about the experience that end users have or will have with a product in development, or a product that is already available. This mindset also implies caring for this experience to be the best possible for users, having their best interests in mind, while also minding the business requirements for the product to be viable and profitable (unless it’s a not-for-profit endeavor). However, the term UX is often misunderstood, so let’s start by defining a few key terms that we will use a lot in this book: user, experience, product, and UX professionals.

1.1 What Is a “user”?

The term “user” generally refers to a human (although animals can also use products made by us) who is interacting with a product, a system, or a service. Thus, the user is not necessarily the customer. If you love video games and you buy one and then play it, you are both the customer and the user. But this is not always the case. If we take the example of a teething toy, the user is typically a baby, while the customer is not (infants are not the ones buying the products). Instead, the customer might be a parent. In many cases, customers’ needs are nonetheless aligned with users’ needs. In our example, a UX professional will care for the teething toy to be easy to grab by infants and to provide them some relief as they munch on it, which is also what parents care about. However, parents might also care about the aesthetic of the teething toy, while this might not matter as much for the baby.

In some cases, customers’ needs might be disconnected to users’ or, worse, go against them. For example, users of a social media platform might care about connecting with their friends, while its customers—companies buying advertising space on the platform—care more about making their product visible and encouraging users to engage with their ads and getting their clicks. Users might then end up seeing curated content that will maximize their engagement with ads (customers’ goal) rather than reinforce their bonds with their friends (users’ goal).

UX professionals care about users first. They “fight for the user,” so to speak. All of the users, not only those who look, think, and behave like them. Having a UX mindset also means caring about inclusion and accessibility. All humans are very similar in most ways, but we are also all a bit different as well. Our small differences are what continue to make humanity so rich and interesting. Accounting for all types of the target users is a key component of UX.

1.2 What Is an “experience”?

The term “experience” refers to what happens when the user interacts with a product, a system, or a service, broadly speaking. Is the interaction intuitive? Do users understand what is going on and what they need to do in order to accomplish their goals? Does this interaction result in satisfying users’ needs and is it pleasurable? In this case, an “interaction” entails what users perceive, what they understand, what actions they do, and how the product is responding to these actions. Sometimes, the experience is mostly about perception and understanding. Take a clock. Most of the time and for most people, the experience we have with a clock is merely our visual perception of it and subsequently our understanding of the information conveyed. The size of the clock and how well the numbers contrast with the background will affect how readable it is. We might also understand the information conveyed by the clock better when the time is displayed in a digital way, rather than when it’s displayed in an analog way (with hands spinning around a dial) with no numbers at all. At times, we might need to interact physically with the clock, to adjust it for daylight saving for example, or to change its batteries.

An experience has a lot to do with interacting with the product itself (the clock in our example), but not only. UX professionals consider the entire experience that led users to interact with the clock: why they wanted a clock, how they bought it (unless the user is not the customer or the product is not-for-profit), how they installed it, how they commonly use it, what happens if there is a problem with it, and they need to contact the customer service. In fact, consideration of the entire experience that users have during their whole journey with a product and its ecosystem is what led Donald Norman, a famous designer and cognitive scientist, to coin the term “UX” in the 1990s. As UX expert Peter Merholz and colleagues say in their book Subject to Change (2008), experience is the only thing that users care about. Thus, this is the most important thing that product creators should care about, more than the product itself.

1.3 What Is a “product”?

In this book, I will use the term “product” to refer to anything users interact with to attain goals, or to be entertained. For example, a microwave is a product that many of us use to heat our food. The term product can thus refer to a physical object (e.g. a microwave, a bottle of water, a toy, a screwdriver, a car, a book), or a digital object (e.g. a video game, an e-book, a website, a smartphone application). It can also refer to a system (e.g. the electoral system of a nation, an education system, a travel reservation system), and/or a service (e.g. a customer service, a delivery service, a translation service).

All those products have certain characteristics and features, some of which directly or indirectly interface with the user. For example, the microwave has an integrated timer system, which is a feature that users can control through face buttons (those buttons are part of what we call the “user interface,” or “UI”). Domestic microwaves also feature a rotating functionality that is meant to heat the food more evenly (to the delight of the user) but not meant for users to interact with directly (we place the food on the plate, which in turn is connected to the rotating device). In the digital world, a feature that users can directly interact with is qualified as being “front-end” while that which is out of reach is qualified as “back-end.” If we take the example of a shopping website, we use the interface (i.e. what we perceive and interact with) to navigate the site, select items, and then buy them. As we do so, in the “back-end” the system is saving the items chosen, consequently adjusting the remaining stock at the warehouse when relevant, communicating with your bank and postal services to seal the purchase, and ship you the items.

At this stage, you might think that having a UX mindset primarily involves technology and requires technical expertise. Many aspects of UX are, in fact, technical. A UX approach requires understanding how a system works in the back-end, how elements should be displayed in the front-end, how humans tend to interact with the system and its surroundings, and overall why they do the things they do. And it often implies understanding how new technologies work and what they can offer. However, one can have a UX mindset for products that aren’t high-tech. For instance, if you own and run a food truck, the product you sell to customers (who are often also your users) is food. The food has certain characteristics: its taste, how it’s presented, wrapped-up, and whether you can easily carry and eat the food while on the go. Caring about the quality of the product is essential, but a UX mindset also involves caring about why your customers will choose your food truck among all the other options they have, how they will order the food, pay, and how you will manage to reduce their wait time. Caring about your user experience is not only important for tech companies, it’s important for any company, and overall anyone offering any type of service.

Having a UX mindset is not just about caring what features (whether back-end or front-end) the product should have, but more importantly it’s about caring about why people would want this product, how they would use it, if this interaction is intuitive and pleasurable, and finally if the product is satisfying from the user’s point of view, considering the entire user journey. Food truck owners care about how people become aware of their business (by smelling delicious food in the street, or seeing an aesthetically pleasing truck, or discovering it out via an application or a leaflet), how they can take notice of the menu and understand it, how they will order the food, how they can eat the food without burning themselves or staining their jacket if they eat on the go, how satisfied they are by the food itself, and if something is wrong with their order, how their complaints are taken care of. And, of course, if everything went well and users are happy, they might spread the word around them and come back regularly.

Caring about the user experience means caring about every little step of the journey that enjoying your product implies. It’s caring about the whole experience for all users.

1.4 Who Are the “UX professionals”?

Having a UX mindset means having users’ best interests in mind. Therefore, technically, UX should be the concern of everyone in a company or organization who directly or indirectly impacts how users will experience a product. It is not the sole responsibility of people having “UX” in their job title. That being said, UX experts are either trained in the science behind UX (human factors and ergonomics, as discussed in Chapter 3) and/or the process, techniques, or methodology that help advance UX (which we will address in Chapter 4). To simplify, we can broadly consider three overarching and overlapping categories of UX practitioners:

• “UX designers,” who are experts in applying the lessons from the “human-computer interaction” (HCI) field to design a product and its ecosystem.
• “UX researchers,” who are experts in conducting studies using the scientific method to understand users and objectively evaluate their experience with a product.
• “UX strategists,” who are experts in advocating for UX practices (i.e. “Lean UX” or “design thinking”), managing other UX experts, and establishing a strategy across a team or a company. These professionals are often called “UX principals” or “directors of UX.”

This listing is not exhaustive but reflects a categorization of the most common UX professionals currently found today. Other profiles exist and are starting to be more visible, such as UX writers who are responsible for writing copy that will be clear and enjoyable for users. Hopefully, more UX profiles will become popular in the near future.

1.4.1 UX Designers

The term UX designer can be confusing because it suggests that those professionals are designing the experience users will have, and that they are solely responsible for it. However, an “experience” is not something that can be designed because it’s the subjective perception and perspective that happens in people’s minds as they interact with a product or its ecosystem. What we can design is a specific environment that we hope will provide a certain experience to our target users when they interact with it. This point is key: We don’t design an experience; we design for an experience. UX designers are experts in designing for an experience by applying HCI principles (see Chapter 3) and using an iterative process (see Chapter 4). Second, UX designers are not solely responsible for the experience users have. Everyone on a product team, the “support teams,” and the executives setting the values and general direction for the company all are responsible for it.

UX design designates a generalist role encompassing all the following tasks: understanding users and their needs, generating ideas to solve users’ problems (ideation phase), prototyping, testing with actual users, iterating, and refining the design until it’s ready for implementation. Although it is common for additional tasks to be assigned to UX designers, the discipline of UX design itself does not inherently involve the implementation of designs. It also does not traditionally involve aesthetics, creative direction, style guides, or branding of a product (which is more typically the role of visual designers). UX design focuses on why users should care about the product and how it should work. The main role of UX designers is to understand what goals users have, what problems they are facing as they are trying to accomplish goals, and how these problems can be solved. UX designers collaborate with their teammates on the content strategy and scope (i.e. what features the product should have) and are experts in defining the structure and organization of a product (i.e. information architecture) and how users will interact with it (i.e. interaction design). Information architecture is about organizing the content and features of a product to help users understand the product and accomplish their goals as exemplified in the organization of a clothing store. For example, does it make more sense to organize the items by colors, by type (i.e. pants, skirts, shirts, dresses, accessories), or by size? You want to organize your store based on what your clients expect and their goals. Now think of a website or a smartphone application: how do you organize your menu so that users can easily access the features that they mostly need and care about?

Interaction design is about defining how users will interact with a product. In the example of the store, it’s thinking about how clients will navigate around the aisles, how they will carry the items they want to try to the booths, and how they will pay. In an app, it’s about thinking about users’ input to accomplish their goals, such as if they need to do a “swipe” or “tap” gesture to select an item, preventing user errors or helping them recover from them, such as if they selected the wrong item, and determining what feedback to give them in such a case. For example, after pressing the button to a certain floor in an elevator, the button lighting up is feedback informing users that the system has acknowledged the user’s input. Interaction design typically involves a UX designer creating low and medium fidelity prototypes to test their assumptions. These prototypes are often made using software that enables non-technical people to quickly create “real” looking interfaces without requiring implementation from an engineer. They are intended to be a high-level representation of the intended design focused on functionality and interaction, without getting caught up in the details of its “look and feel.” Lastly, interaction design is about determining how all users can interact with the product, including those with disabilities and varied needs or characteristics (such as size, weight, strength, or skin complexion). An automatic soap dispenser should work with both light and dark skins. A seatbelt should equally protect short and tall people. A store should avoid unnecessary stairs or have ramps or elevators to be accessed by wheelchair users. Apps should provide flexible ways to be used by everyone. Thus, identifying and removing all unnecessary barriers to make a product as inclusive as possible is essential to UX. Note th...