User Experience Design - Part 1
User Experience Design - the Misunderstood Discipline
When ever I tell people what I do, UX or User Experience Design, there is a pretty much universal response of rolling eyes which soon glaze over and a sweet but obviously rehearsed smile plays across their face. Sure they know it has something to do with websites, well those who are familiar with the online industry at least, but that's about as far as it goes. I usually end up telling them that I help organize and coordinate large websites for brand name companies... and then we talk about something else ;-p
So what is User Experience Design anyways?
Here is where the problem lies; UX is not an easy concept to communicate concisely.
(from Wikipedia)
User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system.
Introducing The To Do List
I've always felt that a good example is the best place to start when attempting to explain something complex. Let's start with something simple like a To Do List. Now your typical To Do List has two basic components, a list of tasks and their status.
| Task | Complete |
|---|---|
| 1) Do laundry. | |
| 2) Take out trash. | X |
| 3) Clean laptop screen. | |
| 4) Finish latest blog post. | X |
Not too complicated right? Well actually it is a very sophisticated piece of Information Architecture, which luckily for all of us, has been institutionalized by our culture and society over the past several thousand years so that we simply take it for granted and use whenever we need to keep track of a set of tasks.
Imagine if no one had ever thought of putting all the tasks in a list and adding a marker somewhere to show that a task was completed. We'd likely still be in a dark age of ignorance without the lowly To Do List. No Project Management, No Scheduled Tasks in computer software, No Banking Transactions - the list of things which require a To Do List is astoundingly long. Now obviously this list of applications uses an even more sophisticated version of the To Do List but still it is there, doing it's job - which is to keep track of a list of tasks and their status.
So what happens when we have more than one type of status and a due date? Our To Do list gets a little more complicated and we will need to provide additional tools for people to effectively use it. This is where User Experience Design comes into play. We need to consider the new potential of this enhanced ToDo List and design an interface which will make these new tools easy to use, obvious to new users and minimize any new complexity so that people can effectively take advantage of them. Oh and we now get to call it a Status List.
| <Task> | Status | Due |
|---|---|---|
| 1) Do laundry. | Waiting | 6:30 pm |
| 2) Take out trash. | Complete | 8:00 am |
| 3) Clean laptop screen. | Waiting | 6:00 pm |
| 4) Finish latest blog post. | In Progress | 4:00 pm |
Our previous example now has 3 columns and a default column sort. If we re-sort based on status we will get the following list (assuming that each status type has a sortable value, ie a numeric equivalent where for instance Complete = 1, In Progress = 2, Waiting = 3 and we order then 1,2,3 "ascending").
| Task | <Status> | Due |
|---|---|---|
| 2) Take out trash. | Complete | 8:00 am |
| 4) Finish latest blog post. | In Progress | 4:00 pm |
| 1) Clean laptop screen. | Waiting | 6:00 pm |
| 3) Do laundry. | Waiting | 3:30 pm |
Not only do we have a list of tasks but we can look at our list in new and enlightening ways. The ability to sort data in this way is a modern convenience really only available to the masses in the computer age. Historically accounting firms have taken on this challenge, though with a hefty price tag and the caveat of human error.
What have we learned so far.
- User Experience Design is complicated.
- User Experience Design is simple.
- User Experience Designe is complicated.
- To Do Lists are an example of UX - which is an acronym for User Experience Design
- The author puts off laundry while he's blogging.
What's next?
We'll continue exploring the simple/complicated To Do/Status List, find out how it relates more directly to UX on the web: