What is User Experience (UX)?

scottker — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:11:00 GMT

"If an application is hard to use, I just use it less"

I haven't posted for a while but after months of thinking about User Experience, how it impacts business, having customers ask "Why is User Experience (UX) important?", it all just came to me at one time. We've been looking for definitions as to what constitutes User Experience and after a lot of conversations with people who are a lot smarter than me, I think this is as good a definition as I've heard from anyone.

User Experience (UX) is anything that can piss off the user.

Or in more politically correct terms....

User Experience (UX) is any component of a system that can cause user dissatisfaction.

That's it, it's not earth shattering, it's probably not politically correct, but I think when you think about User Experience in those terms it can really bring a lot of components into view.

User Interface (UI) is part of User Experience (UX), we know that a bad UI can really cause dissatisfaction. I just want to stress this point again; UI is a subset of UX, not all of it.
Response time is part of UX, if I have to wait 30 seconds for each screen I'm not going to be very happy.
Availability is part of UX, if I'm on an airplane and I can't get to my application, I may be unhappy.
Installation process is part of UX, if it's too hard to install, it may never get used.
Data Access is a part of UX, if I can't get to ALL of the data I need the solution is not complete.

The interesting thing about a definition that is not constrained by Developer or Operations specifically, and the focus of processes like User Centered Design (UCD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_centered_design ), is that they make us think more holistically about the solution from the user perspective, and more importantly what can cause dissatisfaction. Every time a decision is made around the "system", ask the question, "Will this decision cause dissatisfaction?". Then think about the risk/reward from the user perspective.

I could rant on about how many "good for the company" decisions are made every day without concern for the user but I would rather hear your opinion. What are the things YOU think about when you hear the term User Experience (UX)? What is an example of a Good User Experience? A bad one?

Let me know what you think about this?

Scott Kerfoot
Microsoft Corp.

MicrosoftSoCalArchitectBlog : User Experience

What is User Experience (UX)?