User experience

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User experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts. Conversely, designing toward profitability as a main objective often conflicts with ethical user experience objectives and even causes harm. User experience is subjective. However, the attributes that make up the user experience are objective.

Contents

Definitions

According to Nielsen Norman Group, 'user experience' includes all the aspects of the interaction between the end-user with the company, its services, and its products. [1]

The international standard on ergonomics of human-system interaction, ISO 9241, defines user experience as a "user’s perceptions and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a system, product or service". [2] According to the ISO definition, user experience includes all the users' emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during, and after use. The ISO also lists three factors that influence user experience: the system, the user, and the context of use.

Note 3 of the standard hints that usability addresses aspects of user experience, e.g. "usability criteria can be used to assess aspects of user experience". The standard does not go further in clarifying the relation between user experience and usability. Clearly, the two are overlapping concepts, with usability including pragmatic aspects (getting a task done) and user experience focusing on users' feelings stemming both from pragmatic and hedonic aspects of the system. Many practitioners use the terms interchangeably. The term "usability" pre-dates the term "user experience". Part of the reason the terms are often used interchangeably is that, as a practical matter, a user will, at a minimum, require sufficient usability to accomplish a task while the feelings of the user may be less important, even to the user themselves. Since usability is about getting a task done, aspects of user experience like information architecture and user interface can help or hinder a user's experience. If a website has "bad" information architecture and a user has a difficult time finding what they are looking for, then a user will not have an effective, efficient, and satisfying search.

In addition to the ISO standard, there exist several other definitions for user experience. [3] Some of them have been studied by various researchers. [4]

History

Early developments in user experience can be traced back to the Machine Age that includes the 19th and early 20th centuries. Inspired by the machine age intellectual framework, a quest for improving assembly processes to increase production efficiency and output led to the development of major technological advancements, such as mass production of high-volume goods on moving assembly lines, high-speed printing press, large hydroelectric power production plants, and radio technology, to name a few.

Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford were in the forefront of exploring new ways to make human labor more efficient and productive. Taylor's pioneering research into the efficiency of interactions between workers and their tools is the earliest example that resembles today's user experience fundamentals.[ citation needed ]

The term user experience was brought to wider knowledge by Donald Norman in the mid-1990s. [5] He never intended the term "user experience" to be applied only to the affective aspects of usage. A review of his earlier work [6] suggests that the term "user experience" was used to signal a shift to include affective factors, along with the pre-requisite behavioral concerns, which had been traditionally considered in the field. Many usability practitioners continue to research and attend to affective factors associated with end-users, and have been doing so for years, long before the term "user experience" was introduced in the mid-1990s. [7] In an interview in 2007, Norman discusses the widespread use of the term "user experience" and its imprecise meaning as a consequence thereof. [8]

Several developments affected the rise of interest in the user experience:

  1. Recent advances in mobile, ubiquitous, social, and tangible computing technologies have moved human-computer interaction into practically all areas of human activity. This has led to a shift away from usability engineering to a much richer scope of user experience, where users' feelings, motivations, and values are given as much, if not more, attention than efficiency, effectiveness and basic subjective satisfaction (i.e. the three traditional usability metrics.) [9] [10]
  2. In website design, it was important to combine the interests of different stakeholders: marketing, branding, visual design, and usability. Marketing and branding people needed to enter the interactive world where usability was important. Usability people needed to take marketing, branding, and aesthetic needs into account when designing websites. User experience provided a platform to cover the interests of all stakeholders: making web sites easy to use, valuable, and effective for visitors. This is why several early user experience publications focus on website user experience. [11] [12] [13] [14]

The field of user experience represents an expansion and extension of the field of usability, to include the holistic perspective of how a person feels about using a system. The focus is on pleasure and value as well as on performance. The exact definition, framework, and elements of user experience are still evolving.

User experience of an interactive product or a website is usually measured by a number of methods, including questionnaires, focus groups, observed usability tests, user journey mapping and other methods. A freely available questionnaire (available in several languages) is the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). [15] The development and validation of this questionnaire is described in a computer science essay published in 2008. [16]

Higher levels of user experience have been linked to increased effectiveness of digital health interventions targeting improvements in physical activity, [17] nutrition, mental health and smoking. [18]

Google Ngram Viewer shows wide use of the term starting in the 1930s. [19] "He suggested that more follow-up in the field would be welcomed by the user, and would be a means of incorporating the results of user's experience into the design of new machines." Use of the term in relation to computer software also pre-dates Norman. [20]

Influences on user experience

Many factors can influence a user's experience with a system. To address the variety, factors influencing user experience have been classified into three main categories: user's state and previous experience, system properties, and the usage context (situation). [21] Understanding representative users, working environments, interactions and emotional reactions help in designing the system during User experience design.

Momentary emotion or overall user experience

Single experiences influence the overall user experience: [22] the experience of a key click affects the experience of typing a text message, the experience of typing a message affects the experience of text messaging, and the experience of text messaging affects the overall user experience with the phone. The overall user experience is not simply a sum of smaller interaction experiences, because some experiences are more salient than others. Overall user experience is also influenced by factors outside the actual interaction episode: brand, pricing, friends' opinions, reports in media, etc.

One branch in user experience research focuses on emotions. This includes momentary experiences during interaction: designing effective interaction and evaluating emotions. Another branch is interested in understanding the long-term relation between user experience and product appreciation. The industry sees good overall user experience with a company's products as critical for securing brand loyalty and enhancing the growth of the customer base. All temporal levels of user experience (momentary, episodic, and long-term) are important, but the methods to design and evaluate these levels can be very different.

Developer experience

Developer experience (DX) is a user experience from a developer's point of view. It is defined by the tools, processes, and software that a developer uses when interacting with a product or system while in the process of production of another one, such as in software development. [23] DX has had increased attention paid to it especially in businesses who primarily offer software as a service to other businesses where ease of use is a key differentiator in the market. [24]

See also

Related Research Articles

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. It is more concerned with the design intuitiveness of the product and tested with users who have no prior exposure to it. Such testing is paramount to the success of an end product as a fully functioning application that creates confusion amongst its users will not last for long. This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.

Usability engineering is a professional discipline that focuses on improving the usability of interactive systems. It draws on theories from computer science and psychology to define problems that occur during the use of such a system. Usability Engineering involves the testing of designs at various stages of the development process, with users or with usability experts. The history of usability engineering in this context dates back to the 1980s. In 1988, authors John Whiteside and John Bennett—of Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM, respectively—published material on the subject, isolating the early setting of goals, iterative evaluation, and prototyping as key activities. The usability expert Jakob Nielsen is a leader in the field of usability engineering. In his 1993 book Usability Engineering, Nielsen describes methods to use throughout a product development process—so designers can ensure they take into account the most important barriers to learnability, efficiency, memorability, error-free use, and subjective satisfaction before implementing the product. Nielsen’s work describes how to perform usability tests and how to use usability heuristics in the usability engineering lifecycle. Ensuring good usability via this process prevents problems in product adoption after release. Rather than focusing on finding solutions for usability problems—which is the focus of a UX or interaction designer—a usability engineer mainly concentrates on the research phase. In this sense, it is not strictly a design role, and many usability engineers have a background in computer science because of this. Despite this point, its connection to the design trade is absolutely crucial, not least as it delivers the framework by which designers can work so as to be sure that their products will connect properly with their target usership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Norman</span> American researcher, professor, and writer

Donald Arthur Norman is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, and has shaped the development of the field of cognitive systems engineering. He is a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, along with Jakob Nielsen. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. He also holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Norman is an active Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he spends two months a year teaching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usability</span> Capacity of a system for its users to perform tasks

Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.

A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles. These evaluation methods are now widely taught and practiced in the new media sector, where user interfaces are often designed in a short space of time on a budget that may restrict the amount of money available to provide for other types of interface testing.

ISO 9241 is a multi-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) covering ergonomics of human-computer interaction. It is managed by the ISO Technical Committee 159. It was originally titled Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs). From 2006 onwards, the standards were retitled to the more generic Ergonomics of Human System Interaction.

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface design</span> Planned operator–machine interaction

User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

Cognitive ergonomics is a scientific discipline that studies, evaluates, and designs tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems and how they interact with humans and their cognitive abilities. It is defined by the International Ergonomics Association as "concerned with mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system. Cognitive ergonomics is responsible for how work is done in the mind, meaning, the quality of work is dependent on the persons understanding of situations. Situations could include the goals, means, and constraints of work. The relevant topics include mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance, human-computer interaction, human reliability, work stress and training as these may relate to human-system design." Cognitive ergonomics studies cognition in work and operational settings, in order to optimize human well-being and system performance. It is a subset of the larger field of human factors and ergonomics.

Affective design describes the design of products, services, and user interfaces that aim to evoke intended emotional responses from consumers, ultimately improving customer satisfaction. It is often regarded within the domain of technology interaction and computing, in which emotional information is communicated to the computer from the user in a natural and comfortable way. The computer processes the emotional information and adapts or responds to try to improve the interaction in some way. The notion of affective design emerged from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), specifically from the developing area of affective computing. Affective design serves an important role in user experience (UX) as it contributes to the improvement of the user's personal condition in relation to the computing system. Decision-making, brand loyalty, and consumer connections have all been associated with the integration of affective design. The goals of affective design focus on providing users with an optimal, proactive experience. Amongst overlap with several fields, applications of affective design include ambient intelligence, human–robot interaction, and video games.

User experience design defines the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. User experience design is a user centered design approach because it considers the user's experience when using a product or platform. Research, data analysis, and test results drive design decisions in UX design rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), and encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.

Human Factors Integration (HFI) is the process adopted by a number of key industries in Europe to integrate human factors and ergonomics into the systems engineering process. Although each industry has a slightly different domain, the underlying approach is the same.

Human-centered design is an approach to problem-solving commonly used in process, product, service and system design, management, and engineering frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. Human involvement typically takes place in initially observing the problem within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing of concepts and implementing the solution.

Human-centered design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile interaction</span>

Mobile interaction is the study of interaction between mobile users and computers. Mobile interaction is an aspect of human–computer interaction that emerged when computers became small enough to enable mobile usage, around the 1990s.

User experience evaluation (UXE) or user experience assessment (UXA) refers to a collection of methods, skills and tools utilized to uncover how a person perceives a system before, during and after interacting with it. It is non-trivial to assess user experience since user experience is subjective, context-dependent and dynamic over time. For a UXA study to be successful, the researcher has to select the right dimensions, constructs, and methods and target the research for the specific area of interest such as game, transportation, mobile, etc.

The Questionnaire For User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS) is a tool developed to assess users' subjective satisfaction with specific aspects of the human-computer interface. It was developed in 1987 by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab. The QUIS is currently at Version 7.0 with demographic questionnaire, a measure of overall system satisfaction along 6 scales, and measures of 9 specific interface factors. These 9 factors are: screen factors, terminology and system feedback, learning factors, system capabilities, technical manuals, on-line tutorials, multimedia, teleconferencing, and software installation. Currently available in: German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Soft ergonomics is the study of designing virtual interfaces that cater towards the wellness of the human body, its emotional and cognitive abilities.

Tools, devices or software must be evaluated before their release on the market from different points of view such as their technical properties or their usability. Usability evaluation allows assessing whether the product under evaluation is efficient enough, effective enough and sufficiently satisfactory for the users. For this assessment to be objective, there is a need for measurable goals that the system must achieve. That kind of goal is called a usability goal. They are objective criteria against which the results of the usability evaluation are compared to assess the usability of the product under evaluation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ergonomics</span> Designing systems to suit their users

Ergonomics, also known as human factors or human factors engineering (HFE), is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals of human factors engineering are to reduce human error, increase productivity and system availability, and enhance safety, health and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and equipment.

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs and motivations through interviews, surveys, usability evaluations and other forms of feedback methodologies. It is used to understand how people interact with products and evaluate whether design solutions meet their needs. This field of research aims at improving the user experience (UX) of products, services, or processes by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User research is used to improve a multitude of products like websites, mobile phones, medical devices, banking, government services and many more. It is an iterative process that can be used at anytime during product development and is a core part of user-centered design.

References

  1. ↑ Don, Norman; Jakob, Nielsen. "The Definition of User Experience (UX)". Nielsen Norman Group . Retrieved 2 March 2021.
  2. ↑ International Organization for Standardization (2019). Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems (2nd ed.). ISO 9241-210:2019 (formerly known as ISO 13407).
  3. ↑ "User experience definitions". Archived from the original on 13 January 2012.
  4. ↑ Law, E.; Roto, V.; Hassenzahl, M.; Vermeeren, A.; Kort, J. (4–9 April 2009). "Understanding, Scoping and Defining User Experience: A Survey Approach". Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems conference. CHI’09. Boston, MA, USA. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 September 2017.
  5. ↑ Donald Norman, Jim Miller, Austin Henderson: What You See, Some of What's in the Future, And How We Go About Doing It: HI at Apple Computer Archived 20 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine . Proceedings of CHI 1995, Denver, Colorado, USA
  6. ↑ Buley, Leah. 2013, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. Rosenfield Media, LLC, USA.
  7. ↑ Nielsen, Jakob. "A 100-Year View of User Experience". Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved 5 August 2022.
  8. ↑ "Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation". Archived from the original on 7 December 2013.
  9. ↑ ISO 9241-11:1998, Ergonomics of Human System Interaction: Guidance on usability
  10. ↑ "COST - Towards the Integration of Transectorial IT Design and Evaluation (End date: November 2013)". cost.eu. Archived from the original on 14 March 2015. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  11. ↑ Fleming, J. 1998, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience Archived 10 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine . O'Reilly & Associates, Inc, USA.
  12. ↑ Garrett, J. 2003, Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web Archived 3 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine . New Riders Press, USA.
  13. ↑ Kuniavsky, M. (2003). Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research. United States: Elsevier. ISBN   978-0-08-049756-3. Archived from the original on 9 May 2018.
  14. ↑ Berry, D. 2000, The user experience - The iceberg analogy of usability. Technical library of the IBM Ease of Use Team. "The user experience". IBM . October 2000. Archived from the original on 15 August 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2010.
  15. ↑ "UEQ - User Experience Questionnaire". ueq-online.org. Archived from the original on 1 October 2017. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  16. ↑ Laugwitz, B., Held, T. & Schrepp, M. (2008). Construction and evaluation of a user experience questionnaire Archived 11 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine . In: Holzinger, A. (Ed.): USAB 2008, LNCS 5298, S. 63-76.
  17. ↑ Mclaughlin, Matthew; Delaney, Tessa; Hall, Alix; Byaruhanga, Judith; Mackie, Paul; Grady, Alice; Reilly, Kathryn; Campbell, Elizabeth; Sutherland, Rachel; Wiggers, John; Wolfenden, Luke (19 February 2021). "Associations Between Digital Health Intervention Engagement, Physical Activity, and Sedentary Behavior: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 23 (2): e23180. doi: 10.2196/23180 . ISSN   1438-8871. PMC   8011420 . PMID   33605897.
  18. ↑ Donkin, Liesje; Christensen, Helen; Naismith, Sharon L; Neal, Bruce; Hickie, Ian B; Glozier, Nick (5 August 2011). "A Systematic Review of the Impact of Adherence on the Effectiveness of e-Therapies". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 13 (3): e52. doi: 10.2196/jmir.1772 . ISSN   1438-8871. PMC   3222162 . PMID   21821503.
  19. ↑ Lubrication Engineering. 1945.
  20. ↑ "Google Ngram Viewer". books.google.com. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  21. ↑ Hassenzahl, M. & Tractinsky, N. 2006, User Experience – a Research Agenda Archived 20 October 2014 at the Wayback Machine . Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March–April 2006, pp. 91-97
  22. ↑ Forlizzi, J., Battarbee, K. 2004, Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems Archived 31 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine . Proceedings of DIS2004, 1–4 August 2004, Cambridge, USA.
  23. ↑ "Good Developer Experience". Developer Experience Knowledge Base. Retrieved 10 September 2021.
  24. ↑ "What is Developer Experience (DX)?". CSS-Tricks. 15 June 2020. Retrieved 10 September 2021.
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