Introduction to User Experience

What Is User Experience?

If you are reading this book, you already have some idea about, or at least interest in, User Experience (UX). However, you likely arrived at this book and this field via a different path from the colleague sitting next to you or the classmate across the country who is taking the same online human-computer interaction (HCI) or human factors class as you. User experience practitioners and students come to UX from a diverse range of backgrounds, including computer science, psychology, design marketing, business, anthropology, and industrial engineering (Farrell & Nielsen, 2014). This diversity is an advantage; our community adopts the best practices and benefits from the knowledge of all of these disciplines. However, it also means that there is not one singular activity, style, or approach that defines UX.

There are many definitions of UX (see http://www.allaboutux.org/ux-definitions). The User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) defines it as “Every aspect of the user’s interaction with a product, service, or company that make up the user’s perceptions of the whole. User experience design as a discipline is concerned with all the elements that together make up that interface, including layout, visual design, text, brand, sound, and interaction. Usability Engineering works to coordinate these elements to allow for the best possible interaction by users.”

Whereas usability is about creating problem-free interactions, user experience is much broader and holistic. Usability is objective and product-based (i.e., a product is usable), whereas user experience is subjective and human centered (i.e., a person and a product co-create the user experience). Very often, user experience research seeks to gather “user requirements” for the design of technologies (e.g., mobile devices, websites, wearable technologies, software) or evaluate the usability of an existing technology.

User requirements refer to the features/attributes a product should have or how it should perform from the users’ perspective. User-centered design (UCD) is an approach for collecting and analyzing these requirements. This chapter introduces the basic concepts behind UCD, introduces stakeholders and their requirements, and tells you how to get buy-in for your user research activities.

Who Does User Experience?

Lots of people from many different backgrounds do work in user experience (see Figure 1.1). In industry, there are a variety of titles for UX practitioners, including (Farrell & Nielsen, 2014):

■ User experience designer

■ User experience researcher

■ Information architect

■ Interaction designer

■ Human factors engineer

■ Business analyst

■ Consultant

■ Creative director

■ Interaction architect

■ Usability specialist

At the executive level, the titles include (Manning & Bodine, 2012):

■ Chief customer officer

■ Chief client officer

■ Chief experience officer

■ VP of user experience

Fundamentally, UX research is about understanding people, the domain, and technology. In that sense, while we have written this book from the perspective of UX research, the methods we describe can be used in any situation where you want to understand more about human behavior, perceptions, ideas, needs, wants, and concerns and how those play out in various contexts and with various technologies.

User-Centered Design

UCD is a product development approach that focuses on end users. The philosophy is that the product should suit the user, rather than making the user suit the product. This is accomplished by employing techniques, processes, and methods throughout the product life cycle that focus on the user.