Creating Joy in the User Experience ⸺ Dave on Design
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Creating Joy in the User Experience
Consider any recent user experience or user interface design article. An example. What elements are present? Perhaps they include design theory, typography, grids. Or phases: user research, ideation, prototyping. Or user feedback, A/B testing. Or perhaps you read more broad articles such as designing for children, Not an area I know much about, but I suspect knowing more about design for the young will help with design for adults and the elderly. This seems a good introduction. or design as governance. Design as governance: this is insightful. What’s missing in all of them?<br>The actual experience of using the interface.<br>The user experience is not, really, how easily someone navigates through it, how they find the information they seek, how misleading or easy to understand the navigation is, the flow between screens, or the distilled user requirements that dictated how information is presented in screens at all. The experience is how someone feels when using the interface, and that’s a matter of emotion and mood. That’s why splitting UX and UI—some people refer to them as UX being the principles or foundational design and UI the implementation; or UX the early stage, UI the late stage—is a false dichotomy: the actual experience is the experience of the final product, the interaction, the UI. (One example: yet how can UX be the early stage, when the experience is by definition the user’s, and thus the ultimate end part of the process?) I’d prefer to think we as a combined UX & UI role are user interface designers, and we should be judged on the interaction experience. And feelings come from more than the areas that standard UX design practice focuses on. Feelings are something that are inspired, that are indirectly created. I want to share with you the importance here, your responsibility as a designer, of creating positive emotions in your users. Not feelings of productivity or ease of understanding, which are the sterile professional aspect, but emotion as the human aspect, the mood you instill and inspire.<br>It’s all about the vibe.<br>No, seriously! It’s hard to find a better word for the complex overlap of emotion, mood, and your and your interface’s role in creating that in your user, in making them experience it, than saying it’s about the vibe of the interface.<br>◆ ◆ ◆<br>Let’s say your users use your software for the majority of their working day. If you oversee an app or in-house website, your software is their main productivity application. If you work at Microsoft, Apple, or on GTK or KDE, your software is the desktop and operating system itself, its capabilities and look and feel, its widget toolkit and UI guidelines: apps on the platform will use and reflect what you create.<br>Your users will be affected by the experience you provide. After eight hours a day looking at the images you put on screen, and using the interaction metaphors you provide, they will have an emotional response.<br>You have a responsibility to ensure that emotional response is as positive as it can be.<br>Elegance in UX
Several years ago, I oversaw the revamp of a very large (top-20 by code size in the world) app’s entire user interface. The software was a visual mess: it had grown without oversight for over a decade. It had a mix of different visual styles, elements that didn’t line up, cramped use of space, and some functionality was very disorganised. A great UX designer (to whom most of the credit should go) Stephen Zamadics; credited with permission. and I worked together to rework it, making it modern, clean, and elegant, while retaining the benefits of user habit, yet changing what needed to be changed.<br>The Options dialog in this large software: the old dialog, and (drag it more visible using the resizing tool below the image) the new one showing new layout, structure, look and feel, etc.
Drag ⇢
The Options dialog in this large software, at the back the old dialog, and at the front (drag it more visible using the resizing tool below the image) the new one showing new layout, structure, look and feel, etc.
Drag ⇢
The revised user interface was clean; it used space well; it organised complex items (over a hundred pages in the main options dialog Yes, this was very large software. Why retaining so many settings was correct is the subject of another article… let’s just go ahead here! alone) such that it was easy to find what you were looking for; retained familiarity for longterm users; was understandable for new users; and looked modern. However, the interface is clean and spartan: it is well laid out, but not decorative. It is functional and productive, but sterile, without a hint of human whimsy or playfulness. It is elegant, in a flat Nordic Ikea sort of way, but not beautiful.<br>Using it was clearly much better than its predecessor. Yet it was not an interface that excited feelings of joy in our users. It was...