Mashing The User Experience Myths
Recently I had the opportunity and pleasure to go to UX Ireland, a conference in Trinity College focused on designing user experience. As someone interested in making websites better for everyone, and actively studying techniques for designing user interfaces that people love, it seemed a good idea.
Talking with and listening to people at the conference left me with some impressions. For one, the conference seemed targeted squarely at those who might label themselves designers. This is obviously fine - you need a target audience - but it made me think about who in the design & build pipeline can influence the experience of a user, be it a positive or negative experience.
Is it the project manager, who might do initial discovery with a prospective site owner, to figure out the scope of a project? Or is it the solutions architect, who figures out how to deliver the project technically? Or maybe it's the graphic/web designer, who makes it beautiful? Is it down to the look & feel, the information architecture, or the technical build?
During an exercise where we mapped out all the steps we could think of between initial brief and site launch it was interesting to see which areas the assembled participants considered 'under their control'. Performance and accessibility were two key elements picked out during the exercise. Interestingly, these were considered 'technical', and therefore more in the realm of those writing code. It seemed to me that there was a tendency to consider user experience to begin with research and end with a pretty design.
I would strongly contend that performance and accessibility are two elements of a build that are absolutely essential for a positive user experience, and who better to champion them along every step of the way than someone claiming the role of the user experience expert? I believe that nobody in the team building a website can ignore user experience, but it does take someone to champion it throughout the process, to ensure that the experience does not degrade over the course of the build.
One other take-away from the conference was this: whilst there was a lot of talk about research to inform design, I got the impression that many people consider user experience design to be about designing 'digital experiences' for users. However, I have come to realise that it isn't about that, however entertaining and valuable that may be.
User experience design is about taking the users' experience and using it to inform better design.
User experience driven design.
Think about it. When you want to bring your sites to the next level, we're ready.
Anthony Lindsay Director of Managed Services
With decades of experience, Anthony leads the Annertech Managed Services Team, delivering top quality design, development, and, ultimately peace-of-mind services to all of Annertech's wonderful clients.
