The UX Disciplines
Since a number of startup founders are using user experience terms in weird ways, I thought I’d write this basic primer on what goes into UX . But remember that the best user experience still can’t save a product that does not offer value to the user (poor product), or a product that no one has heard of or can remember to use (poor marketing/sales/training).
The first three disciplines of UX are “close to the canvas.” By which I mean, the medium or platform (tablet, laptop, phone, smartphone) plays a big role in their practice. For example, a website designer and a book designer live in very different worlds. These first 3 are often combined into one role, like “web designer with JavaScript skills”
Aesthetics - a lot of people refer to this as design, but it is only one of many components of design. Aesthetic appeal is subjective, but a good designer will find you an aesthetic that your target market will associate with positively. Sometimes, the same aesthetic will have very different effects on different audiences. Take steam punk for example. It has an eclectic, off-beat hipster appeal in the US, but is often seen as dull and old fashioned in India. So the trick with aesthetics is to make sure that your audience reacts positively to it. Sometimes you’ll get a positive reaction that is not the one you want. Your audience might think “sexy”, when what you were going for is “classy”. The output of aesthetics is a finished product appearance and a style guide.
Interface Design - This is how you lay out the basic building blocks of your user interface. This includes not only visible/ audible controls, but also gestures like swiping, pinching, double clicking etc. Every platform makes a number of surfaces, widgets and controls available, and it’s important to lay them out well and use them in appropriate ways. Many UI design patterns fall squarely within Interface Design, although many straddle the line with Interaction Design. The output of Interface Design is a set of screens.
Interaction Design - Interaction design is all about flow. From a high level goal of what the user wishes to accomplish, an interaction designer should be able to distill it into a certain number of screens, come up with branching flows and evaluate them against each other. Sometimes though, the best interaction is no interaction at all. The output of interaction design is user flows for various user segments and features.
The next three disciplines are more abstract. They deal with the the “what” and “why” of your product more than the “how” of it. Ideally, you want senior folks in these roles.
Usability - this is everything about letting users do what they want to do, as easily and as comfortably as possible with the least amount of training. A good usability engineer will help you think through questions like, “do we even need this feature?”, “should this be a basic option or an advanced one?” through both, heuristics as well as user testing. They will also be able to take into account the needs of your audience and come up with appropriate solutions. For example, if you are designing an app for professional stock trading, you need to simplify some things, but you need to live with the complexity of stock information display. Documentation, technical writing and training are associated disciplines that are more important for complex systems.
Group usability - this is all about the dynamics of social systems. Where interaction design focuses on how the user interacts with the UI, group usability focuses on how users interact with each-other. The types of interactions (friending, liking, retweeting) and the objects that they interact over (“social objects”, like posts, tweets, pictures etc), have to be designed to allow for the emergent phenomena that happens due to such interactions (timelines, lists, rankings, recommendations). Often, these interactions are peripheral to the users’ actual purpose. For example, the user goes to an online news site to be informed. But the news site would like the user to spread the word about its articles. So in addition to producing quality content, they also need to make it really easy to share the article.
Persuasion - Persuasion, optimisation and Gamification all deal with how you can convince users to do something that you want them to do. It’s pretty hard to convince a user to do something they don’t really want to do, but it’s possible to convince them to do something that they are just too lazy or slightly reluctant to do. The strategies adopted to do this fall into 2 broad buckets: simplification and incentivisation. Simplification is what made the Facebook “like” button such a huge success. Many B2B lead forms have used both, a simpler form and a case study or white paper incentive, to increase conversion rates. Incentivisation (both positive and negative) works especially well within games as well as in well-gamified systems like Foursquare. A word of warning though - just slapping badges and levels on to any old app may not just be ineffective, but it can even turn users off. So approach gamification with care.
