What is User Experience?
I have just finished reading an article posted on Smashing Magazine about UX design (UX = User Experience) that is well worth a read.
User Experience quite often gets confused with Usability – some people (including Information Architects and developers) think that if all the links are underlined, you have breadcrumbs and alt tags then you have designed the ultimate user experience. But it is a lot more than that. UX and Usability are obviously inseparable, usability is still the greatest factor in good UX design but it is far from being the only one.
Design, Accessibility, Performance , IA and the ‘human factor’ are all part of good UX. It is not necessarily as complex as it may sound but can often make clients (or designers) roll their eyes and mutter “here we go again” when it is brought up. UX is really all that counts (once a user has found your site that is). A bad user experience and you have lost that user forever, they tell their friends and you may have lost them, someone tweets about it and your problem gets a lot worse. Worse than that still, you don’t sell any product, get any sales leads and waste your investment.
Not all sites and need complex UX design but if you are building any site at all you need to consider what UX means and how it applies to the success of your site.
Read the article and then read the UX quotes at the bottom – some of them make you realize the dangers of not considering your user when building a site.
