We've all had good and bad experiences with products that we use in our daily lives. So, let's think for a minute about what makes an experience good and what makes an experience not so good. When we think about a good experience, what are some words that we might use to describe it? We might say that a product is useful, and that it helps us accomplish something that we need to do. We might say that it's easy to learn, it's easy to figure out how to get things done with it. It might be helpful, it helps us accomplish something that's important to us. It's accessible, we can access it on the devices and in the places that we need and using the motor and perceptual capabilities that we have available to us. Perhaps it's attractive, perhaps it's pleasant to look at and pleasant to interact with. It might even be in some cases fun to interact with. It might help us to feel more connected to other people or to the organization or the company that's providing the service or the product. Dare we dream that a product could be delightful and that the experience could leave us feeling better than we did when we started using it. In the end, a good user experience is satisfying. What about a bad user experience? Well, we might think of a bad user experience as being one that's stressful. One that perhaps, we don't really know how to use the system to do what we need to do. Perhaps, that's because it's confusing, we're not sure which way to go or how to use the different features that are available. Maybe it's ugly. Maybe it works okay, but it's just unpleasant to look at or is inelegant, it's not enjoyable. Perhaps, it's distracting. Perhaps, it forces us to do things or engage with features of the system that are not part of what we're trying to accomplish. Therefore maybe it's inefficient, it takes too long to do things, and maybe it's tedious. It forces us to re-enter information that we've already given it or that it should already know. Some systems can even be condescending. They force us to do things in ways that don't take advantage of our knowledge, and our skills, and our abilities. Some systems can feel inconsiderate. They don't allow us to do things the way that we want to do them. They force us to do it the way that their designers have decided things should work. In the end, a bad user experience is often frustrating. We leave the experience feeling worse than we did when we started. Well, why does it matter? Of course, we'd all like to have good user experiences and as designers of products, we would like to deliver good experiences. Well, there's more to it than that. When you're designing a system, you're trying to solve a problem that your users have. But at the same time, you're trying to accomplish goals that drove you to design the system in the first place which might be getting people to visit your website or buy your product, or use your a service to buy other products. It's important that your users experience success so that you can meet the product goals. Additionally, if your users experience success, they're much more likely to come back and do it again, and they're also much more likely to recommend your product to others, to create a virtuous cycle where not only are they coming back and using the system and doing whatever it is that you want them to do, but they're getting other people to try it out and do those things as well. Let's go through a couple of examples here. So, let's take the example of Amazon, huge retailer, online retailer, that sells pretty much everything under the sun. Why is it important to Amazon that users have a good experience when they come there? Well, the answer initially is pretty obvious. Their goal is to get you to buy stuff through Amazon, and if you're not successful at buying stuff, they won't be successful as a company. They also want you to enjoy the stuff that you get. They want you to have a successful experience, not just in the process of buying it, but with actually using whatever it is that you get. So, they want to make sure that you have enough information to get the right thing, and they do this through recommendations and reviews, and product information, and all things like that. If you enjoy the experience of using the system and the experience of using the products that you buy through Amazon, you're much more likely to come back again and buy more stuff in the future, and you're also more likely to recommend Amazon to others when they need things for their own lives. Let's take a really different example. This is the website of the city of Ann Arbor, which is the city where I live and the city where the University of Michigan is located. What are they trying to accomplish? Why is it important for a municipal website like this to deliver a good user experience? Well, they built the website for a reason, and one of the primary reasons they built it is to help citizens find information about how the city works. Let's say I need to figure out how to pay my parking ticket, or report a pothole or a broken street light, or find out what construction is going to be happening that might affect my commute to work. By effectively delivering information, the city website can help the residents of the city understand how the services work. They can understand when their trash pickup day is, and how to report problems when they arise, and how to use city services more efficiently. Because at the end of the day, the goal that the city would have for a site like this is to streamline the services that they offer to make it more efficient so that fewer people have to pick up the phone and call somebody or come into a city office and use more time-consuming ways of getting things done. Like with any other good user experience, if one user has a positive experience, they're much more likely to recommend it to others when they have similar needs. So, let's look at one more example, and this one is quite different than the last two that we looked at. This is a digital glucometer, which is a device that's used by people that have diabetes to measure their blood glucose level which is very important for maintaining their health, for determining what it's safe for them to eat, whether they need to take an insulin dose to balance their blood sugar and so on and so forth. So, why is it important for the manufacturers of this device to ensure that users have a good user experience? Well, a critical goal with a device like this is to improve its users health. To make sure that users are successful at finding out what their health status is so that they can make the right decisions in their lives. Of course, it's very important with a product like this to make sure that they do no harm. So, err on the side of safety where other design considerations might be in tension with each other. It's also important not just to convince users that this is a product that will give them a positive user experience, but also to convince the health providers and insurers that this is a safe device but also a device that will result in a better health outcome for the people that need to use it. Again, like with other types of products, if the users are successful at having a positive user experience, they're much more likely to recommend it to others who have a similar need. When we talk about the user experience, we're talking about really the experience that people have when they interact with your product across the board. That means of course, using the product. But it also means other things like choosing the product from among the myriad of other products that might be out there, whether it's other websites or other apps that are on the app store. Acquiring the product. How do they actually go from selecting the product to getting it in their hands so that they can actually use it? Whether it's accessing it via a web browser or downloading it or purchasing it in the store. It also includes the experience of learning to use the product. So, getting from that point of acquiring it in the first place to actually being productive and experience success with it. User experience also includes fixing the product. Not everything works out of the box. Perhaps, it's because of a problem that somebody's having understanding how to use the product or maybe the product is broken and needs to be fixed. So, how do they go about getting help when they're stuck or when they have a problem? User experience also includes upgrading the product, or purchasing the next product, or starting to use the next version of the product and so on and so forth, and it includes many other things as well, and these are just a few examples. So, why is user experience hard, and we know what a good user experience should look like, we know what we want to avoid, but why is it not always easy to do this? Well, one of the reasons that it's hard is that you as the designer are not the user. Even if you are a potential user of this product, you don't represent all the users, and it's very important to go out and understand who the users are, what they need, how they work, so that you can design effectively for them. Another reason that UX is hard is because most of the time in UX we're dealing with software, we're dealing with computer-based interactive systems, and computers think differently than people do. So, translating what works and what's easy to do for a computer programmers and what's easy for computers to do into what makes sense for users, is a big part of what we do in UX and it's challenging. We often get it wrong the first time, and we have to go through many cycles to get it right. The products that we're designing are usually quite complex because of the fact that they're software based, and it's so easy to add new features. So, helping keep a focus on the user experience and what users really need is a critical part, and it can often be very challenging especially when designing larger and more complex systems. Fortunately, in user experience, we have techniques that we now work to help make user experience easy. First, we follow an iterative prototyping process. As I said just a minute ago, we usually get it wrong the first time. So, rather than trying to get everything perfect right out of the gate, we try to use techniques that allow us to fail fast and learn from our mistakes. We do that by applying user-centered research and design methods, and we have a whole set of these that we know will work to help keep the designer on track and make sure that we're designing something that's going to end up delivering a good user experience in the end. It helps to understand a bit about human behavior. You don't need to have a degree in psychology in order to design good user experiences, but it is helpful to know a little bit about how people work and what we know will help them accomplish what they need to accomplish. Ultimately, we do all of these things to allow us to apply common sense by following an iterative prototyping process that uses user-centered research and design methods, and knowing a bit about human behavior, we're in a much better position to use our own common sense to make good decisions when designing systems.
