Misconceptions of User Experience

One of the things that makes writing this blog interesting is that we write for wildly different types of readers. These include:

• designers, for whom I wrote design strategy and Steven wrote portal theory,
• developers and builders, for whom Steven wrote issues with always-aware applications,
• mobile product owners, promoting user experience in general, such as the recent Ovi post.

Whitney Hess' recent 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design really addresses what it is we do. As I read this article, I kept being struck by things that resonate with me in my job, to this very day. She outlines what we do, and what people perceive that we do.

User experience goes beyond pixels

While we like talking about pixels, color depth, and typography around here, take a look at what we have written about. This is an image of the top 75 words in our blog for the past month or so ... strategy, product, business, design, application, interaction, users, service, operators, customers, understand.

The pixel stuff is easy compared to the human side of things.

Only a component of what we do

Visual design is only a component of what we do. If what you want is sexy "skins" for your site or application (or one time, an entire Linux mobile OS), you should probably go somewhere else. And if you haven't yet spent serious user experience design effort on behavior, you need to fix your process (we can help).

Usability testing is only a component of what we do. It helps us measure how good a design is, and identify where major issues are. Then... we fix them.

User research is only a component of what we do. It helps us make sure we are designing the right products with the right interactions.

Wireframes are only a component of what we do. Page layout and content design are important, but we go deeper. How should your business processes be changed to improve user experience? What about database architecture?

Product strategy is only a component of what we do.

Christian Lindholm writes of three levels of user experience: bling, control, and utility.

All of us at the office think that "bling" has too many negative connotations, especially for something that he says includes, "visuals, colours, content density and partly motion." In fact, we prefer the different Presentation, Function, and Information... more on that in a later post. Nevertheless, frameworks help explain that we do more than just pixel-pushing.