The Web Designer's guide to User Experience

By Craig Grannell


User experience ('UX' to its friends) is a term increasingly bandied about. Currently in that strange position of being excitingly new to many, touted as an essential component of web design process by industry experts and seemingly on the way to becoming ubiquitous, UX also has an air of mystery about it. This is partly because it's tricky to pin down exactly what it is. When interviewed, industry pros told us the term can be "subjective", "hard to describe" and has come to mean various things.

Dan Saffer, principal at Kicker Studios, was perhaps the most succinct, describing UX as "What a customer perceives while engaged with your product and a way of looking at a product holistically, from the point of view of a user who likely doesn't care about how something is made, just the product itself."

THE BENEFITS OF UX DESIGN
When people talk about UX design for the web, they're referring to everything that fashions user experience: interface design, information architecture, usability and product design that encompasses the presentation, interaction and organisation of online services.

"The process for UX design is therefore about understanding and designing a user's experience from start to finish, not just what a website looks like or how it functions," explains Clearleft's user experience director, Andy Budd.

Once, this line of thinking might have seemed overblown in nature, but as Luke Wroblewski, senior principal of product ideation and design at Yahoo, says: "Barriers to entry in digital products are very low. There are now so many websites that functionality and technology are baseline features and users differentiate on the basis of how something works – the experience they have with it. When competing services are a click away, managing that experience and giving people something they really want to use goes a long way to getting people interested in your output."

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