Developers, designers, business people all struggle every day to make sense of what User Experience (UX) is. That’s because they have a different segmented sense of what UX really is since everyone sees it from their own perspectives instead of having a holisitc understanding of the so-called User Experience. In this article, I am going to question the very fundamentals of this discipline which is the heart and core of every software business. Let’s start with debunking some of the most common misconceptions around UX.
Debunking Myths Around User Experience (UX)
UX is NOT interface design
Interfaces only implies what the user sees and interacts with. It’s the final step of an extensive process. It’s the end result of UX but not the whole of UX.
Interface is a component of user experience, but there’s much more.”
Peter Merholz, Co-founder, Adaptive Path
UX includes business research, competitors analysis, understanding what users need and why they behave how they behave. So, obviously, UX is way more than building an interface.
User Experience is not about cosmetics, pixel pushing and button placement.. its everyone’s concern.” - Christian Crumlish, Curator, Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
User Experience is the core of everyone’s job whether the know it or not, from project managers to designers to developers. Everyone has an effect on the user experience.
UX is NOT a step in a process. It is THE process
User Experience is not a checkbox. You don’t do it and then move on.” - Liz Danzico, School of Visual Arts
UX is everybody’s job. It starts from defining a business strategy up to building a programmed visual interface for the end users to interact with and solve their problems.
UX must be an ongoing effort, continually learning about users, responding to behaviours and evolving the product or service.
UX is NOT about technology
There is a misconception that UX is only in digital products. But that cannot be far from truth. UX doesn’t actually need a screen. UX is any interaction with any product, any artifact and any system.
UX is NOT just about usability/efficiency
If UX is solely about efficiency (solving a problem), then why don’t you cut your hair with an axe?
Usability’s focus on efficiency and effectiveness blurs out a lot of the important factors of UX including learnability and emotional behaviours and responses to the products and services people use. Every product we use invokes some emotions in us. You might create the most sharp blade in the world to cut hairs, but if it is going to cut my finger too, no one is going to actually use it!
Many products are overwhelming, confusing, hard to learn and boring. No one wants to use those products no matter how efficient you are.
UX is NOT just about users
While the term says User Experience, in reality it should also take into account the value we make for business owners. UX is a loop of value. You create something valuable for users, they purchase it, you make money and improve your service.
What is User Experience?
User Experience simply refers to the way a product behaves and is used in the real world. A positive user experience is one in which the goals of both the user and the organization that created the product are met.
Usability is one attribute of a successful user experience, but usability alone does not make an experience positive for the user.
User Experience = Business goals + customers goals + UI + development
User Experience is a combination of these attributes, known as UX Honeycomb.
When we have a product with all these attributes combined, we can call it valuable.
From a tactical point, UX is a combination of certain activities: user research, interaction design, visual design, information architecture (IA), front-end development, content, user testing.
User Experience is problem solving. Not all problems are worth the effort to find solutions for. UX is about finding good problems and creating good solutions for them. If your solution isn’t successful, it’s because you didn’t have a good problem to solve in the first place.
We use products when we can easily figure out how to accomplish our tasks in a simple way, no matter how complex the process is with clear feedback and an ability to recover quickly from errors.
UX is also a balancing act between your innovation, feasibility, product’s desirability and its viability; your desire to make something new and innovative or to improve what is already there, your ability to actually do and solve the problems you identify, how desireable your solution is and how likely that your product is going to stay in the competition for a while once the seeds are planted.
In this article, we learned about UX myths and misconceptions, and how all parts of the business are tightly related to UX and also we learned what makes a good UX by covering the UX honeycomb and how we should balance our drive for innovation with the feasibility of our solutions and how likely our solutions are going to live in the marketplace in the long run.