Why drop $1,199.69 on a Breville Dual Boiler Semi Automatic Espresso Machine when you could just buy a simple Bodum Chambord 8 cup French Press for $39.99? The french press is over a thousand dollars cheaper than the espresso machine and has a higher user review. It goes to show that the more expensive, more complex products aren't the ones that always deliver the best user experience.
User experience: the experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world.
More and more businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage for all kinds of products and services. If your users have a bad experience they won't comeback. If they have an OK experience with your product, but a better experience with your competitor site, they'll go back to the competitor, not yours. So how do you create a good user experience?
From product design to user experience design
- When people think about product design they often think of it in terms of aesthetic appeal: a well designed product is one that looks good to the eye and feels good to the touch.
- Functionality terms: a well designed product is one that does what it promises to do.
The french press coffee maker pictured above shows a simple product that is a functioning product that is also aesthetically appealing. These steps to using this product are depicted through the four images.
The more complex a product is, the more difficult it becomes to identify exactly how to deliver a successful experience o the user. Each additional feature, function, or step in the process of using a product creates another opportunity for the experience to fall short.
Any user experience effort aims to improve efficiency. This comes in two forms:
- Helping people work faster
- Helping people make fewer mistakes
There is less tendency for errors to occur when a product is simple and designed to work quickly and efficiently. The french press coffee maker allows the user to make coffee exactly as they please (for example, using any type of coffee grounds and deciding their coffee:water ratio). Coffee is usually made in the morning before people rush out the door. Who wants to start off their morning stressed out because they couldn't get their daily cup of joe? No one. So ditch the complex technology that's associate with most coffee machines, and switch over to the french press in order to create your perfect cup of coffee with ease.
Minding Your Users
Take the user into account every step of the way as you develop your product. There are many different kinds of coffee drinkers. (Here's an interesting article about 29 Types of Coffee Drinkers, just for your entertainment.) It must be taken into account when designing a coffee machine that not all people drink their coffee the same way.
The biggest reason user experience should matter to you is that it matters to your users. The french press allows the user to take control and make their own cup of coffee exactly how they want to make it. This product simply provides the user with the equipment necessary to make their perfect cup of coffee. All the ingredients (coffee grounds, water, sugar, milk, cream, etc.) that are added to the coffee are dependent on the person who will be drinking the coffee, not the coffee machine.
The Five Planes
The biggest reason user experience should matter to you is that it matters to your users. The french press allows the user to take control and make their own cup of coffee exactly how they want to make it. This product simply provides the user with the equipment necessary to make their perfect cup of coffee. All the ingredients (coffee grounds, water, sugar, milk, cream, etc.) that are added to the coffee are dependent on the person who will be drinking the coffee, not the coffee machine.
The Five Planes
The user experience design process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user's experience with your product happens without your conscious, explicit intent. This means taking into account every possibility of every action the user is likely to take and understanding the user's expectations at every step of the way through that process. These five place provide a conceptual framework for talking about user experience problems and the tools we use to solve them.
- Surface Plane: on the surface the user sees a series of web pages, made up of images and text.
- Skeleton Plane: the placement of buttons, controls, photos, and blocks of text.
- Structure Plane: defines how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there.
- Scope Plane: defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together.
- Strategy Plane: incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out but what the users want to get out of the site as well.
On the lowest plane, we aren't concerned about the final shape of the product. On the highest place, we are only concerned with the most concrete details of the appearance of the product. Plane by plane, the decisions we have to make become a little more specific and involve finer levels of detail.
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