In UX, Everything Truly is Everything

Weird ass title…I know…So let me explain.

I recently started re-reading an old UX blog called 52 Weeks of UX by Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer. Week 1 is about communication and what makes up the user experience, and what I gathered from it is that everything you do is a form of communication and everything a user does with (and possibly without) your product is the user experience. These are not new concepts, but they are ones that can be easily forgotten in the hustle and bustle of project sprints, stakeholders, and product lifecycles.

Let’s dive a little deeper

Brewer mentions in his piece on communication that there is no such thing as “anti-communication.”

“You cannot not communicate.” — Paul Watzlawick

So everything you do or don’t do is part of your communication with your user. From your UI elements to your copy, all of this is part of your overall message and how you communicate with your users. This is a very important thing to remember, because once you start to see it as an all inclusive thing, you can begin to use both side of the coin to your advantage. “Do I really need to say this?” “What will the user think if I do not put this here?”

The absence of something is not nothing…

As for the User Experience

Porter explains what we all know but tend to forget. Everything the user does with our product is part of the user experience…not just the UI. How they hear about your product, what their friends say about it, how they first access it, what their onboarding experience is, how they feel about it 3 weeks in, how it is perceived in the market, and communication they have with your company on any medium…All of this makes up the total user experience.

You cannot ignore one piece or it will all be a wash. once negative experience is more powerful than 10 positive ones. So remember to look at your product as a whole and see how they entire experience fits into your user’s life. Make it easy on them to use your product and always focus on making their life easier and better. Awesome products are not awesome because they were made that way…They are awesome because they make their user’s awesome!