Column: Eliciting Desired Behavior

Some people mistakenly use the terms user experience and usability almost interchangeably. However, usability is increasingly being used to refer specifically to the ease with which users can complete their intended tasks, and is closely associated with usability testing. Therefore, many perceive usability to be a rather tactical aspect of product design. In contrast, UX professionals use the term user experience much more broadly, to cover everything ranging from ease of use to user engagement to visual appeal. User experience better captures all of the psychological and behavioral aspects of users’ interactions with products.

To help define the objectives and scope of user experience efforts, as well as enable their meaningful measurement, I would like to propose a conceptual framework that describes four distinct elements of user experience, as shown in Figure 1, and how they interact with one another in driving better product designs. Read More

Many designers, product managers, and front-end developers hold a false belief: users should notice and understand the changes that we make to user interfaces. For example, they might assume that users would pay attention to a new logo that they just put on their Web site’s home page, should read the update message telling them about the logo, and should appreciate that their new design is more visually appealing than the old one.

Observing designers’ and product managers’ response to how real users react to user-interface changes, I’ve heard them say: “I can’t believe that they didn’t notice the difference!” After our already having asked users a hundred times, they asked: “Can you ask them one more time whether they noticed this?” “Should we make it bigger so they will notice?”—when it’s already a huge banner. Or simply, “How come? Are they blind?” Read More

In Part III of this series, I explained how the relative importance of the following four elements of user experience varies depending on the type of product you’re designing:

• value
• adoptability
• desirability
• usability

For convenience, I’ll refer to these four UX elements using the acronym VADU (Value, Adoptability, Desirability, Usability). Read More