"User Experience and Why it Matters" Review

After reading, "User Experience and Why it Matters", a chapter out of Jesse James Garrett's 'The Elements of User Experience', I realized that without users, all products are useless. It's the users that make products successful and when designing websites, we must not think about ourselves in the design but mostly must think of our users.

User Experience: The experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world.

• User experience is about how it works on the outside, where a person comes into contact with something.
• Every product that is used by someone creates a user experience.

From Product Design to User Experience Design

• The aesthetic dimension of product design is a sure attention-getter.
• People think about design in functional terms (if something works or not)
• Designing products with the user experience as an explicit outcome means looking beyond the functional or aesthetic.

Designing (for) Experience: Use Matters

• The requirements to deliver a successful user experience are independent of the definition of the product and the more complex a product is, the more difficult it becomes to identify exactly how to deliver a successful experience to the user.

User Experience and the Web

• On the web, user experience becomes even more important than it is for other kinds of products.
• A website it a self-service product.
• More and more businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage--not just for websites, but for all kinds of products and services.
• User experience forms the customer's impression of a company's offerings, differentiates a company from its competitors, and determines whether your customer will ever come back.

Good User Experience is Good Business

• Content, or information, must be communicated as effectively as possible. It has to be presented in a way that helps people absorb it and understand it.
• Features and functions always matter, but user experience has a far greater effect on customer loyalty.
• A good user experience brings customers back to your site.
• Return of Investment: For every dollar you spend, how many dollars of value are you getting back?
• Conversion Rate: a common way of measuring the effectiveness of a user experience. It's a common measure of return on investment. Conversion Rate can give you a better sense of the return on your user experience investment than simple sales figures. It tracks how successful you are in getting those who visit to spend some money.
• Any user experience effort aims to improve efficiency. 1) Helping people work faster and 2) helping them make fewer mistakes.

Minding Your Users

• User-centered Design: the practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences. The concept is to take the user into account every step of the way as you develop your product.
• Everything the user experiences should be the result of a conscious decision on your part.
• The biggest reason user experience should matter to you is that it matters to your users.

Discussion Questions

1. Do we take in to account the our own experiences when we use our cell phones and other electronic media?
2. Do we tend to focus more on the user experience of electronic media versus traditional media?