UX thoughts - What is this UX thing anyway?

Many people try to define User Experience. Excellent definitions can be read on Wikipedia, at uxnet, etc. On the other hand, these definitions smell like a textbook. Here is my take on the subject:

- User Experience is all the Experience a User has while using your product.

And yes, this includes such uncontrollable factors like the squeaking of the chair they are sitting on, the interrupting phone calls from their colleagues or even whether they had an argument or a nice evening out with their spouse. All this can shape their opinion on your product, even if you can’t do anything about them. After all, users are human, just like you. And here comes the difficult part: they are not like you at all except when you are creating a tool for yourself.

“You are not your user”

is the most important thing you have to think about while creating the User Interface of your software.

Why am I talking about software? I am a software person, so my thoughts are mostly about the user experience of software. But even a knife, the road you walk on, a computer mouse or a remote control has user experience, and have (or should have) ux engineers thinking long and hard about the ergonomics, usability, discoverability, learning curve, etc. of their tools. But please let me stay in the field I know best. So, from now on, when talking about UX and UI, I mean the User Experience and the User Interface of software. Unless stated otherwise, of course. :)

There are quite a few components of UX that you can control:

• performance,
• correctness (whether the software does what is expected from it),
• learning curve,
• and of course, the User Interface itself

So, what is this User Interface thingy? Let me answer that in my next post.